Editing Storyboard (section)

==Origins==
Many large budget silent films were storyboarded, but most of this material has been lost during the reduction of the studio archives during the 1970s and 1980s.{{citation needed|date=February 2017}} Special effects pioneer [[Georges Méliès]] is known to have been among the first filmmakers to use storyboards and pre-production art to visualize planned effects.<ref name="Gress">{{cite book|last1=Gress|first1=Jon|title=Visual Effects and Compositing|date=2015|publisher=New Riders|location=San Francisco|isbn=9780133807240|page=23|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9XrjBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA23|access-date=21 February 2017}}</ref> However, storyboarding in the form widely known today was developed at the [[Walt Disney Feature Animation|Walt Disney studio]] during the early 1930s.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Whitehead|first1=Mark|title=Animation|url=https://archive.org/details/animationpockete00whit|url-access=limited|date=2004|publisher=Pocket Essentials|isbn=9781903047460|pages=[https://archive.org/details/animationpockete00whit/page/n46 47]}}</ref> In the biography of her father, ''The Story of Walt Disney'' (Henry Holt, 1956), [[Diane Disney Miller]] explains that the first complete storyboards were created for the 1933 Disney short ''[[Three Little Pigs (film)|Three Little Pigs]]''.<ref>'The Story of Walt Disney' (Henry Holt, 1956)</ref> According to John Canemaker, in ''Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards'' (1999, Hyperion Press), the first storyboards at Disney evolved from comic book-like "story sketches" created in the 1920s to illustrate concepts for animated cartoon short subjects such as ''[[Plane Crazy]]'' and ''[[Steamboat Willie]]'', and within a few years the idea spread to other studios.

According to Christopher Finch in ''[[The Art of Walt Disney]]'' (1995), 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.<ref name="Finch">{{Cite book|title=The Art of Walt Disney : From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms|last=Finch|first=Christopher|publisher=Harry N. Abrams Incorporated|year=1995|isbn=0-8109-1962-1|location=New York|pages=64}}</ref>  According to [[Pete Docter]] and Don Peri in ''Directing at Disney'' (2024), [[Dick Huemer]] credited [[Ted Sears]] with first inventing the storyboard while he was working at [[Fleischer Studios]], but that studio was uninterested.<ref name="Peri_Page_14">{{cite book |last1=Peri |first1=Don |last2=Docter |first2=Pete |author2-link=Pete Docter |title=Directing at Disney: The Original Directors of Walt's Animated Films |date=2024 |publisher=Disney Editions |location=Los Angeles |isbn=9781484755747 |page=14 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ovdZEQAAQBAJ&pg=PA14}}</ref>  Sears then switched to working for Walt Disney Productions and introduced the storyboard to Walt Disney, who promptly understood its importance.<ref name="Peri_Page_14" /> 

Either way, it was Walt Disney who first recognized the necessity for studios to maintain a separate "story department" with specialized [[storyboard artist]]s (that is, a new occupation distinct from [[animator]]s), as he had realized that audiences would not watch a film unless its story gave them a reason to care about the characters.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Lee|first1=Newton|author2=Krystina Madej|title=Disney Stories: Getting to Digital|date=2012|publisher=Springer Science+Business Media|location=London|isbn=9781461421016|pages=55–56}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Krasniewicz|first1=Louise|title=Walt Disney: A Biography|date=2010|publisher=Greenwood|location=Santa Barbara|isbn=9780313358302|pages=60–64}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Gabler|first1=Neal|title=Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination|date=2007|publisher=Vintage Books|location=New York|isbn=9780679757474|pages=181–189}}</ref> The second studio to switch from "story sketches" to storyboards was [[Walter Lantz Productions]] in early 1935;<ref>1936 documentary ''Cartoonland Mysteries''</ref> by 1936 [[Harman-Ising]] and [[Warner Bros. Cartoons|Leon Schlesinger Productions]] also followed suit.  By 1937 or 1938, all American animation studios were using storyboards.

''[[Gone with the Wind (film)|Gone with the Wind]]'' (1939) was one of the first live-action films to be completely storyboarded. [[William Cameron Menzies]], the film's [[production designer]], was hired by producer [[David O. Selznick]] to design every shot of the film.

Storyboarding became popular in live-action film production during the early 1940s and grew into a standard medium for the previsualization of films. [[Pace Gallery]] curator Annette Micheloson, writing of the exhibition ''Drawing into Film: Director's Drawings'', considered the 1940s to 1990s to be the period in which "production design was largely characterized by the adoption of the storyboard". Storyboards are now an essential part of the creative process.