workflow
Storyboard and animatic
Stop-motion production map
Definition
A storyboard sequences a script into individual drawn shots before a single frame of animation is exposed; an animatic times those drawings against a scratch soundtrack to lock pacing, staging and shot length before physical production begins. In stop motion the pair does more work than in drawn or CG animation: a shot committed to camera cannot be reshot or padded with extra coverage, so the animatic -- not the shoot -- is the last point where story and timing can still change cheaply.
Overview
On Kubo and the Two Strings, Laika treats the storyboard-to-animatic stage as the point where a stop-motion film is actually made, because everything after it is execution. Director Travis Knight has described the sequence bluntly: the studio does not design anything until the script itself is right, then "you start bringing in your designers... then you start bringing in illustrators... little by little you start bringing more and more people into it." The storyboard artists build what Knight calls a story reel -- a rough, boarded cut of the entire film -- and that alone takes "about a year, a year and a half" before puppets or sets exist. The reason is structural, not aesthetic: "we can't have any wasted effort in stop-motion so every frame we shoot is precious and basically has to go into the film." Because there is no coverage and no reshoot budget, every staging and timing decision that a director on a live-action or CG production could defer to the edit has to be solved in the story reel and its animatic, so that what looks spontaneous on screen -- Knight's phrase is that it should feel like it's "spontaneously happening in the moment" -- is in fact the product of a year or more of drawn rehearsal.
At Aardman, the same stage is understood less as a single drawing pass and more as a shared surface the whole production works from. Animation scholar Paul Ward's case study of the studio's boarding process (based on interviews with story artists Luis Cook, Ashley Boddy and Michael Salter) frames storyboards as "boundary objects" -- material that different departments read for different purposes, connecting story, direction, design and schedule rather than belonging to any one of them. Aardman also cuts its dialogue before it boards to picture: the studio records voice work first because animators perform to the finished track, and the animatic -- a roughly animated, timed storyboard -- is built to lock against that audio rather than the other way around, so line length and comic timing are fixed before a single puppet pose is planned. On Early Man, TESTED's Adam Savage spent time with an Aardman story artist on exactly this stage, documenting the boards as, in the studio's own description, a road map for how the film's action will unfold -- the same function Ward's academic account gives it, seen from the floor rather than the seminar room.
The animatic does not fully hand off to the physical stage either -- Aardman treats previs as a return trip back to the board. Researcher Tom Livingstone's case study of the studio's virtual-production R&D, published in Convergence in 2025, describes sequences bouncing between storyboard, animatic and previs "a few times" before a shot is locked, and documents an experimental VR/AR "Blockout Tool" used on Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, where a director and director of photography walk through a white-card version of a set together -- in Livingstone's account, so they "understand the space and start thinking about how the storyboard will translate to the set" -- rather than waiting on revisions from a single artist's workstation, the bottleneck of a traditional previs pass. The point of the extra iteration is the same one Knight describes at Laika from the opposite side of the Atlantic: a stop-motion animatic has to survive contact with the physical stage before the stage is built, because there is no other point in the process where staging is this cheap to change.
Workflow
- Script locks first. Knight: nothing is designed "until we feel very good about the script" -- boards follow the page, not the other way around.
- Storyboard artists draw the film shot by shot, sequence by sequence, building what Laika calls a story reel and Aardman treats as a shared "boundary object" read by story, direction, design and scheduling departments alike.
- Dialogue and reference audio are recorded and cut against the boards -- at Aardman, voice work is finished before the animatic is timed, since animators perform to the finished track.
- The animatic times the boards to that track, locking shot length, staging and comic or dramatic pacing before any puppet, set or camera exists.
- Previs passes test camera angles and blocking against the animatic -- on productions using VR/AR tools such as Aardman's Blockout system, a director and DOP can walk a white-card set together rather than waiting on artist-workstation revisions.
- Sequences bounce back to storyboard when previs reveals a staging problem, repeating the previous two steps until the animatic is locked -- the version animators and camera crews then shoot to on stage.