Acting and emotion - making the drawing perform
Anyone can draw a face. A storyboard artist has to make it act - and animation is the best school there is.
9 minute read · one activity · lesson 11 of 21
A board's job is to carry a performance that has not been performed yet. The actor is not cast. The camera has not rolled. And still the producer must be able to feel the moment.
The book calls this an impossible artistic algorithm - and then lists what you are simultaneously holding in your head for a single frame: the location, the environment, the mood, the narrative beat, the action, the acting, the props, the product, the cast, the camera, and the ever-changing stage.
Where to steal from
The book's answer is unambiguous: DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney. Watch how those artists use the eyebrows, the eyes, the mouth and the body language. It is unmatched by any other resource.
Animation is the most demanding acting discipline there is, precisely because it is over-expressed - the emotion has nowhere to hide. Learn it there, at full volume, then turn the volume down for live action.
Then watch your favourite actors, and watch how the camera supports them. Expression lives in the magic between those two things - performance and lens - and you are drawing both.
The economy of a storyboard face
Do not over-detail your cast. The book is explicit: draw enough difference that the viewer can tell them apart without confusion, and no more. Glasses, hair colour, face shape. That is often the entire character design a board needs.
And get fast at eyes. This is one of the most concrete pieces of advice in the whole book, and one of the most under-rated: eyes are where a character becomes a person.
Ask the question nobody asks
Ask the director how the scene is AFFECTING the cast in this moment. Not what they do - how it lands on them. That answer changes the eyebrows, and the eyebrows change the frame, and the frame is what wins the pitch.
“Get quick at drawing eyes. This will be the key to giving your characters life.”
- Mitchell James Hughes, Storyboard Art
The eyes have it
Two drills: one for speed, one for the thing speed is in service of.
- DRILL 1 - Eyes. Fill a page with 40 pairs of eyes. Vary the brow only: raised, furrowed, one raised, flat, tensed. 30 seconds each. Do this every morning for a week and watch what happens to your faces.
- DRILL 2 - One line, six readings. Take one line of dialogue: 'You're early.' Draw the same character saying it six times - delighted, suspicious, exhausted, afraid, bored, in love.
- Change ONLY the brow, the eyes, the mouth and the shoulders. Same framing, same character, same shot size.
- Show the six to someone with the labels covered. Have them guess each emotion. Score yourself out of six.
What you should have at the end
Forty pairs of eyes and six readings of one line. Anything below 4/6 on the guessing test means the emotion is in your head, not on the paper - which is the only place it counts.
Day 11 in one line
Steal the acting from animation, then turn it down. Keep the cast simple enough to tell apart. Get fast at eyes.
This course is free and stays free. If you want to board in the suite Mitchell James Hughes built for his own work - script, shot list, storyboard, animatic, AI artist - the free tier opens every app with no card.
Start free →