[PRE-PRODUCTION] Storyboard Research - 1920s Disney

As I am producing a character which is intended to represent the 1920s era of animation, I want to research 1920 to 1930s pre-production for animation, to do this I will be looking at storyboards from around this time. Above are the original storyboards from Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, one thing I noticed about these are the fact that they're a hybrid of a script and a storyboard. Although Micky Mouse debuted in Steamboat Willie, he originally starred in the short Plane Crazy, however with the limitations of sound at the time it wasn't released until much later. The storyboard for Plane Crazy was slightly different than the storyboard for Steamboat Willie, as it was only a series of sketched with numbers and crosses as directions, below is a quote from Digitalmediafx when discussing the original storyboard:

"Most experts concur that the use of storyboards was invented at the Disney studio. Although at Disney storyboards didn't come into general use until 1933, the Plane Crazy story sketches of 1928 are a clearly a precursor to the full-fledged storyboards that would become a staple of the cinematic process. These sketches were typical of the format in which stories would thereafter be presented at Disney. Once the panels were drawn, Disney marked his directions for animation. Checks, double checks, numbers, lined numbers, circled numbers, numbers in different colors--all of these marks held significant meaning as to how the film would be animated. An 'X' or 'Cut' was written to note a deletion, long and close shots were noted by the hand of Disney as well." 

This gives us a much better insight into how and why storyboards were drawn this way, however it wasn't until much later that we saw a more modern looking scripts with clear direction, however it is interesting to see that even with the limitations at the time, they were still able to produce storyboards. This wasn't the first time where Disney created scripts like this, infact, he used this method or his previous animations, including Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, although these storyboards go back further than Plane Crazy. As you can see with the storyboards on the right, the direction was slightly more chaotic and less detailed, much more white can be seen on this and less detail on the backgrounds, although this gives us a better chance to focus more on the characters.