ADDITIONAL INFO
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"Where Did All the Great
STORY ARTISTS Go?!"
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This is the question top tier feature animation studios ask me most. Â
Become the storyteller they want to hire, know they can rely on, and fight to keep!
What Is a Story Artist?
At the heart of every project is STORY! Walt Disney created the first story artist roles for his story departments to add the missing visual clarity they needed while screenwriting. The more cinematic the medium, the more cinematic the language and writing needs to be, in order to fully harness it. If you've ever seen how Hayao Miyazaki writes his films through storyboarding, or the story pitches of Pixar legends like Joe Ranft, those are gold standard examples of being a story artist. It's best described as half-writer, half-director – or a combination of assistant writer and unit director; focused on one scene at a time to inform and fulfill a film directors vision.
What Do Story Artists DO?
Story artists get assigned a sequence to write/re-write and storyboard. Whether you are writing it from scratch, from a loose outline, or re-writing/adapting pages, your job is to make it into a story told cinematically (image and sound).
Through a series of pitches and check-ins, you write, board, and act out the scene, then polish storyboards to be cut into a story reel while whatever you wrote is transcribed into the master draft of the films screenplay, where dialogue can be refined for recording sessions. Sometimes your pitches lead to you cast as temp voice recordings, and in rare cases you may become the voice used in the final cut.Â
Sometimes if it's an action scene or something else complex that needs another level of clarity and 'sell' to the studio, we might do an animatic to get approval, and/or solidify things going forward.
Talent Drought!
For well over a decade studios have been underwhelmed by a dearth of overly-polished story portfolios lacking in the foundational storytelling, filmmaking, and entertainment skills they need to keep story departments reliable. When studios approach me for recommendations, the story artists I used to recommend have all been promoted up and on to bigger roles!
Studio Training, Without the Studio
That leads to studios asking me to train teams for them, and despite how incredible the feedback is or how much I enjoy doing it, they always want more than I can possibly offer. So, I'm opening this training up to everyone outside those walls, no gatekeeping or catch 22's of needing to be hired to get the training to be hired. It's also not narrowly focused on a single studios methods, or shoestring training initiatives, but the universal foundations they all share, and that I've been a firsthand part of over the past 25 years.
Who Is This for?
Serious visual storytellers! Whether you're an aspiring story artist yourself, a filmmaker or screenwriters looking to grow your skillset, or in another field seeking to adapt effective story skills and methods of the most successful feature animation studios to your pipeline - this class is for you!
✔️　ASPIRING STORY ARTISTS
- College/Art School Students
- TV Storyboard Artists eyeing feature jobs
- Other depts interested in the Story Dept
- An alternative to story internships
✔️　FILMMAKERS & SCREENWRITERS
- Directors seeking clearer direction tools
- Screenwriters expanding their skillset
- Comedians who write and sketch
- Youtube & indie filmmakers
✔️　NEW MEDIA PIPELINES
- Narrative Designers wanting more clarity
- Webcomic  artists
- Visual Authors
- Producers improving their story pipelines
Intimidated by Drawing?
Don't be!
You do need basic writing and drawing skills to start, but you don’t have to be a pro. Ideally, your drawing should be around third- or fourth-year art school level (figure drawing, anatomy, perspective, composition, etc). Â
If you're still shaky on fundamentals, build those up first. I can't do refunds so be sure you have this to get the most possible out of the class.
That said, I don’t care how “good” your drawings are and ultimately it's your call. I don't want to prevent people from trying either since you'll learn as you go too. Sometimes being too good is the problem as well!
ex: In college, my story teachers from Pixar, fresh off of Toy Story taught us to "un-draw". We were all trying to impress them, but they reminded us: we're not draftsmen – we're storytellers. In the end, nobody will ever see your sketches, just your story and filmmaking choices. The rest of design & production are going to make it look better than you ever will; you're there to build and tell a story worthy of their time and talent.
Why Write Like This?
Because film is an audio-visual medium, we need an audio-visual language to tell that story in. Text on a page is of course a great start, but can only go so far before inspiring wildly different interpretations in table reads and assignments. Nobody wants to find out after the time and resources have been spent that what everyone thought they had agreed upon, was not in reality what any of them were envisioning!
A/V Medium, A/V Language
Story Artists exist to not only avoid that by clarifying vision, but find the ways of telling a story that go beyond keys on a keyboard, with the full palette of audio/visual language. By harnessing the full spectrum of the medium's palette to not just tell, but also write the story – by design you're more inclined to explore the entire scope of your medium, and thus more likely to find something new which audiences haven't seen 100 iterations of already.
