Many times the simple description of "story-board" is not really sufficient. Mostly with first time film makers, the actual "story-board" stops at the concept phase, before jumping right into the fun stuff...the filming... or animating. A little bit like building a house from scratch without a foundation. So I am very pleased to see that the Filmakademie has decided to include story-board into the curriculum at an early stage. I extended my talks to include the VFX workflow as much as I could and how the story-board process could be incorporated here. As Steve Hulett just recently mentioned in the TAG blog:
"Of the year’s 10 top-grossing films, three fit what the Academy celebrates via its 13-years-young animated feature category: “Despicable Me 2,” “Monsters University” and “The Croods.” But then, what do you call “Iron Man 3,” “Oz the Great and Powerful,” “World War Z” and “Gravity”? Each of those more-digital-than-not blockbusters could be “animated” enough to fit the Acad’s definition, “in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique.” “Gravity” makes an especially intriguing case, since Sandra Bullock and George Clooney’s faces are often the only practical element that appears onscreen. Director Alfonso Cuaron has repeatedly described the innovative process they developed to create the film as being akin to that of making an animated movie. Only after the team had spent 2½ years nailing down the lighting, angles and character animation in a detailed previsualization did it reverse-engineer a way to shoot footage of the actors..." (read the rest of the article here)I am not sure if Story-board Artist will ever be able to get a nomination, but the time that animation is treated as its own category might be over eventually.
