From Storyboard to Screen - Spirited Away

On the Spirited Away DVD there is a special featurette which offers the audience a "behind the scenes" look at the original storyboards used in the creation of the masterpiece. All the storyboards are displayed as an animatic, with the full audio track for the film alongside, offering a whole other dimension to the film and the process it took, which is often not appreciated.

What I found most interesting was the simplicity of many frames:

Here all that is needed are the key emotions as the background has already been displayed previously in detail. This is a technique that will speed up the process of storyboarding, making for much quicker pre-production.

The shadowing was emphasised with brown pencil which I found a great technique to define and differentiate between shades. 

The backgrounds were drawn quick but detailed and spanned across several frames in order to offer a breadth of setting for the camera to pan through, which was most beautiful to see. Small arrows also indicated the movement of heads, limbs and even background objects such as clouds!

All in all, I loved watching the featurette and I thouroughly reccomend it to any aspiring animators. It felt as if you were part of the journey to the creation of the jewel of Studio Ghibli's collection.