Story: Writing Cartoons Part Four- The Rough Board

This post is the third in a series on Cartoon Writing. For the first two installments, see... Writing Cartoons: Part One- The Gag Session, Part Two- A Continuity Emerges and Part Three- Structure


Woolie Reitherman, Bill Peet, Ken Andersen and
Ham Luske tussle during a story meeting for
"101 Dalmatians" (via Michael Sporn's Splog.)
When we left off last time in our series on cartoon writing, the gag sessions had led to the establishment of an overall structure and continuity. The random threads of ideas had meshed into the framework of a story with a beginning, middle and end. Today, we are going to look at how that bare skeleton outline was fleshed out for the first time in rough storyboard form. But first, a little bit about the relationship between the story men and the rest of the animation staff...

In the photo above, you see story man Bill Peet rough-housing with designer Ken Anderson and directors Woolie Reitherman and Ham Luske. Unlike today, when a cartoon scriptwriter rarely if ever ventures into the artists' domain, golden age cartoon writers interfaced with a large chunk of the animation staff on a daily basis. As we discussed in the first couple of articles in this series, animators were on hand at all story meetings to suggest sequences of action that would lend themselves to funny animation. But at Disney, the influence of the animation staff on the story went even further than that...

INSPIRATIONAL ART

Disney employed a special crew of artists whose sole duty was to visualize the ideas being tossed out for consideration during the story meetings. They established the key setups in the film. The drawing above is a very early inspiration sketch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was drawn by one of Disney's greatest concept artists, Albert Hurter. (See our previous post on Hurter.) At the time this sketch was created, the character designs hadn't yet been finalized, however Hurter was called upon to determine the best way to stage the scene. If you compare this sketch to the scene as it appears in the film, you'll see how closely Hurter's background details were followed by the layout department.


Concept artists would also experiment with the overall design approach. In the "Dance of the Hours" sequence from Fantasia, it was decided to contrast different design motifs for each of the various times of day... the morning section consisted of static horizontal and vertical lines, the afternoon was made up of ellipses, the evening was represented by S curves, and in the example above by James Bodrero from the night sequence, zig zags predominated.


As the story progressed, the cast of characters would come into focus. Artists would be assigned to establish and refine the way each of the characters looked. This example is a design by Grim Natwick for an unmade Silly Symphony based on the Aesop's Fable, "The Three Musicians of Bremen".

All of the designs from the conceptual artists would filter back to the story department, where they were pinned up on the boards and incorporated into the story sketches as the project progressed. I'll have more on that in the next article in this series.

THE ROUGH STORYBOARD
The technique of drawing out stories in sketches goes back to the earliest days of animation. It probably evolved out of newspaper comics. Here we have a thumbnail storyboard from around 1927 by Grim Natwick from Bill Nolan's Krazy Kat studio. Unlike most storyboards, this one reads top to bottom instead of left to right.




The basic story of this board is as follows...

Krazy Kat is spending a quiet evening at home with his wife, who is listening to the radio. Krazy sneaks away to call his girlfriend and crawls into the phone and through the wires to meet her at the "Flaming Youth" nightclub. They dance to the music of the hot jazz band, and as the tempo speeds up, the whole room joins in a wild dancing frenzy. Krazy begins swinging his girlfriend around the dance floor. It is revealed that the music is being broadcast on the radio and Krazy's wife is listening in. The station announcer mentions that Krazy Kat is on the dance floor, and the wife stomps down to the nightclub to confront him. Just as the song reaches its climax, the wife enters and bops Krazy over the head with a bass fiddle.

Grim told me that the earliest form of storyboard he ever saw was at Hearst's International Film Service studio. The director, Gregory LaCava would doodle out the story in rough thumbnail form straight ahead as a comic strip. Then he would mark the scene cuts, assign an approximate length to each scene, and take a pair of scissors and cut the panels up into sequences to hand out to the animators. This technique probably had its origins even earlier at the Raoul Barre studio, where LaCava trained to animate. The interesting thing about the Krazy Kat storyboard pictured above is that by 1927, the technique was well enough established that stock storyboard paper was printed up with the boxes ready to be filled in.


In the early 30s at Disney, the technique was perfected by Webb Smith, who suggested drawing the panels on individual sheets of paper and pinning them up on cork boards. This made it simple to add or delete panels, and allowed the storyboard artist to see the visual flow of an entire sequence at once.

At Disney, the boards evolved as the sequences developed, but at Warner Bros, there were two iterations of storyboards for each cartoon- the first draft thumbnail board and the final director's board. The thumbnail board was the storyboard artist's first pass at the story. He was free to work out the basic gags, staging and cutting, without having to deal with drawing the poses "on model" or putting a lot of detail into the backgrounds. At this stage, dialogue was just a general suggestion- it wasn't locked down until the director had input on the board. That way the dialogue would be a natural outgrowth of the action, instead of the action being driven by the dialogue.

Here is an example of a thumbnail board by John Dunn from the Bugs Bunny Show (1960)...





There are a couple of interesting things we can deduce from this board. It appears that the panels with the glue stains were boarded first. They probably represent Dunn's first thoughts on gags for the story. He then went back and expanded the introductions to the sequences and the transitions in and out of the commercials. Dialogue for some sections is indicated by placeholders. (ie: "Foghorn introduces commercial.", "Foghorn cons hawk.") These lines would be written once the action of the cartoon was all approved. At this stage, only the dialogue needed to sell the gag was necessary, and even that could change as the board developed. The end of this board is quite choppy. It's likely that more development was done on the final gags before the board was ready to go into production. At this early stage, the scene numbering for production tracking had not yet been established. Scene cuts might still be moved or eliminated as the board evolved. So the numbering on the panels is simply a page number to keep the drawings in order.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the technique of storyboarding took a huge step backwards. Instead of using Webb Smith's more flexible cork board and push pin system, story artists went back to drawing out the action on stock printed paper with six or more boxes printed on it. This made it difficult to insert or delete panels. Here is an example of a thumbnail board from Format Films' The Alvin Show... It was most likely drawn by veteran Disney and UPA story man, Leo Salkin. Notice how he juggles different sorts of shots to create a visual rhythm. The animation on this show was extremely limited, so contrasts in design were needed to make up for it...










It appears that page five required some revision, but the pre-printed paper made it difficult to juggle the order and number of panels. Salkin was forced to completely redraw every panel on the page, wasting time and losing some of the spark of life in his thumbnails in the process. Also note the pasteover at the bottom of page seven and the numerous erasures throughout the board. Why did they abandon a system that worked well for one that didn't?


This particular board has an interesting last page. Salkin planned out the shots very carefully to allow background paintings to be reused in multiple shots. This saved money and allowed the background painters more time to paint the establishing shots. Very clever!

Here is the finished Chipmunk cartoon to compare with the thumbnail board...



The next article in this series will deal with the pitch...

For more on cartoon writing see... Writing Cartoons: Part One- The Gag Session, Part Two- A Continuity Emerges and Part Three- Structure

See also... The Greatest Cartoon Writer of All Time, Alvin Show Pilot Board, Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard, Clair Weeks' Banyan Deer Storyboard, Louise Zingarelli's Cool World Board, Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Board Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Stimpy's Invention Board Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
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Pitch: Herb Klynn's The Shrimp Part One

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.



Over the weekend, we received another donation from the family of UPA and Format Films designer, Herb Klynn. The Klynn collection is fascinating, because it consists of portfolio cases full of unsold pitches. The one I'm featuring today is a sort of animated Leave It To Beaver in a style very similar to the films of UPA. These sketches are very likely the work of Klynn himself, and stand as an example of his impeccable design sense and appeal.

Here is Format Films' presentation for THE SHRIMP.


My name is Christopher. I'm a guy like everybody else.


This is The Shrimp. He's my brother and he's different.


He doesn't talk much. He just follows me and copies everything I do. That's his turtle, Mr. Coolidge.


His really name is Marvin. Only everybody calls him Shrimp. Except my mother. She calls him Marvin. I don't know why. My mother thinks he's an angel. She kisses him and junk like that. Someday he'll bite her. She'll see.


My father likes the Shrimp too. I don't know why. Maybe it's because he ain't home all day like me. Some day he'll find out.


My mother thinks he's more important than the President maybe. She doesn't care about me havin' fun. Oh no. I'm supposed to take care of him and watch him and keep his nose dry. It's all I do practically. He has the wettest nose on the block.


Nobody talks like my mother. Not nearly. Just listen to her: "Christopher what's the matter with you why must you be so selfish you're a big boy you're eight marvin's only four anybody would think you'd love to take him with you wherever you go if you ever tie him to a fire hydrant again and leave him there so he has to ring false alarms for help you'll be so sorry I'll do more than just tell your father I'll take away your bicycle for good!" See? She never even has to take a breath.


These are the guys in our gang. With our shadow.


The Shrimp never wants to play with the little kids. He only wants to be with me and the other big guys. Like the ones in my gang. Which are swell.


This if Funk-Funk. He's keen. When he grows up, he wants to get tattooed all over and be in the circus.


This is Fats. He's neat. Once he ate twenty two Eskimo Pies without throwing up. He just got a rash.


This is Cannonball. He's cool. He never takes off his skates. Except in bed. Or on Christmas.


Caption missing.


This is Hubba. He's slick. He likes girls.


I do too. But it depends on the girl.

Although the humor in South Park is from a totally different universe, imagine how much better the show would be if it had half the style and expressiveness of these sketches. Quality design and expressive animation matters.

Many thanks to the family of Herb Klynn. I'll post more from this pitch soon.

If you found this article to be interesting, see also... Herb Klynn And The Animated Feature That Might Have Been.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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Media: Two Disney Concept Artists

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.

Today, we digitized more vintage model sheets on loan to us by Archive Alliance member, Van Eaton Galleries. (For our previous posting, see... Reluctant Dragon and Pinocchio Model Sheets.) Among the collection were some fascinating early concept sketches by two very unique designers... Albert Hurter and Charlie Thorson.

ALBERT HURTER

Albert Hurter was born in Switzerland in 1883. He came to America during the first World War and found work in the New York animation scene. He moved West and ended up working at Disney as a concept artist. His influence is seen in many of the Silly Symphonies and early features. His strengths were an unfailing solidity of drawing, and an eye for creating situations, not just designs. For more info on his life and career, see Bud Plant's Biography and John Canemaker's book, Before the Animation Begins.

Here are some inspirational designs by Albert Hurter...











CHARLIE THORSON

Until Gene Waltz's book, Cartoon Charlie: The Life and Art of Animation Pioneer Charles Thorson, few people had heard of Charlie Thorson, but once you see his work, it's hard not to recognize his unique style in many cartoons from the 1930s. Thorson was responsible for the first model of proto-Bugs' Bunny and the Porky Pig redesign at Warner Bros, as well as numerous characters in Disney Silly Symphonies and Fleischer Stone Age cartoons.

Here are two beautiful model sheets Thorson created for Disney's "Little Hiawatha"...




I'm not sure who did this next piece, but it impressed me with the amount of detail and refinement Disney allowed his concept artists to instill in their work... I'm sure when this concept drawing was created, no one had any idea how the delicate pastel rendering technique would be translated into ink & paint!



These original production photostatic model sheets are available for sale by Van Eaton Galleries for $50 apiece. If you decide to add any of them to your collection, tell the folks at the Van Eaton Galleries that ASIFA-Hollywood referred you, and they will donate a portion of your purchase price to the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

For more vintage Disney model sheets, see... Reluctant Dragon and Pinocchio Model Sheets. Thanks to the Van Eaton Galleries for their support of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

9.02.08
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