Prepare to Board! ─ Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts

Successful storyboards and poignant characters have the power to make elusive thoughts and emotions tangible for audiences. Packed with illustrations that illuminate and a text that entertains and informs, Prepare to Board , 2^nd edition presents the methods and techniques of animation master, Nancy Beiman, with a focus on pre-production, story development and character design. As one of the only storyboard titles on the market that explores the intersection of creative character design and storyboard development, the second edition of Prepare to Board is an invaluable resource for beginner and intermediate artists. Animators and artists will be able to spot potential problems before they cost time and money. Learn how the animation storyboard differs from live action boards and how characters must be developed simultaneously with the story. Positive and negative examples of storyboard and character design are presented and analyzed to demonstrate successful problem-solving techniques, applicable to a variety of animation projects. Featuring in-depth interviews with leading animators and storyboard artists, artists and animators alike can adapt professional workflows, techniques and problem solving solutions and add them to their own creative toolkit. Of course, no book about storyboarding would be complete without a rundown of the basic concepts of cinematic storytelling: camera angles, lenses, and composition. Artwork from an international array of students and professionals supplement the author’s own illustrations. New to this edition will be a fully developed companion website featuring video tutorials highlighting the creation of animatics, good and bad pitching techniques along with updated images and even more content driven techniques.

• Adapt?key techniques, tips and tricks of experienced character designers and storyboard artists with 30 years of experience to your?film, television and animation projects.
• Save time and money?with?workflow solutions and avoid common mistakes and problems with troubleshooting tips and tricks. ?
• Implement creative solutions for your own projects with this invaluable resource for beginner and intermediate artists with examples of?what a good storyboard and character design should look like and example of poorly designed storyboards.???
• Further your artistic?skill development with an interactive, companion website which will includes video tutorials, examples of animatics and good and bad pitching techniques.

Currently teaching animation and character design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Nancy has worked for nearly thirty years as a supervising animator, director, character designer, and storyboard artist. A graduate of the Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts, Nancy worked in development and as a supervising animator on several Disney features including A Goofy Movie, Hercules and Treasure Planet. She was nominated for an Annie award in 2000 for storyboarding Little Angelita for Disney and won a Cine Golden Eagle in 1984 for her personal film Your Feets' Too Big. Nancy is a member of the National Cartoonists Society and the Australian Black and White Cartoonists Club. In recent years she has illustrated two children's books, Duffy and the Invisible Crocodile and Basil Bigboots the Pirate for Australian writer Patricia Bernard in 2004, and taught at the Savannah College of Art And Design.