Storyboarding

"Disney credited animator Webb Smith with creating the idea of drawing scenes on separate sheets of paper and pinning them up on a bulletin board to tell a story in sequence, thus creating the first storyboard (Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney, Abrams, 1973)."(1)

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Storyboards are an easy and clear way to show key elements in an animation; storyboarding is used heavily in shows such as steven universe as all the key animation is done by a third party in korea. The visual clues from the story boards break language barriers and make a scene more easily understandable. A form of storyboarding used primarly by amature youtubers called animatics show these storyboards in a sequential way allowing the view to piece together the movement from the animation. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j65dPwuvo70

(motion lines imply movement)

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With a stopmotion project storyboarding is essential for the animator as they need a visual refrence as to where the figures need moving to and what tweening (the inbe"tween" motions between each shot) would be needed to get to that point. a storyboard can be produced by taking pictures of the key poses in a sequence or drawn out. The art can be as simple or as complex as the artist desires and can be split into as many fragments as the artist chooses. A simpler example of a storyboard would be that of the starwars films where as a more complicated one would be more recogniasble as disney.

With my own 7 second piece of film I split the scene into 20 sections focusing on the basic form and motion of the body.