The Art of the Storyboard, 2nd Edition

 

Chapter 1The Storyboard’s Beginnings

 

 

The film industry’s current use of storyboards as a preproduction, pre-visualization tool owes its humble beginnings to the original Sunday comics. Pioneers like Winsor McKay, whose Gertie the Dinosaur (see Figure 1-1) and animation of the Sinking of the Lusitania (1915) established him as the true originator of the animated cartoon as an art form. He paved the way for Disney and others.

The concept of telling a story through a series of sequential drawings actually goes back to Egyptian hieroglyphics, even back to the cave men’s drawings of stampeding cattle. The Bayeux Tapestries (1050), woven on linen and depicting with brutal narrative action William the Conqueror’s invasion of England, is still ...