In the last article, we looked at the process of story editing a script. Now we look at two of the key aspects of production: storyboards and slugging.
Here are some examples of storyboard cover pages from the archive
Once a script was passed to Marvel's storyboard department, first draft storyboards were normally expected to be completed within two to three weeks. Ideally, each act of an episode would be assigned to a separate artist. Some top artists, such as Will Meugniot on the G.I Joe episodes Cobra Quake and Worlds Without End part 1, had provision in their contracts to storyboard an episode on their own. As the workload increased at Marvel during late 1985 and into 1986, there were instances of an artist having to storyboard an episode on their own in the same timescale normally given to three artists. Such as Doug Lefler's incredibly rough boards for the Transformers episode Cosmic Rust.
At this time in the animation industry, the obligation to be on-model did not lie with the storyboard artists. That was reserved for the layouts, a process which had been outsourced either to the animating studio, or to !XAM Productions in Utah.
Because of this, combined with the presence among Marvel's storyboard department of top comic book artists, storyboards had a variety of contrasting art styles. From clean, simple lines to very rough to heavily stylised in a way that would never make it to the actual animation.
From Defenders Of The Earth episode 39: The Defense Never Rests
From the Dungeons & Dragons episode 16 The Girl Who Dreamed Tomorrow
From Jem episode 33 Trick Or Techrat. The music video for We Can Change It, version 2
Once the first draft was completed, a copy would be sent to the animation directors (Or sequence directors, depending on how they were credited). A number of them were veterans of the animation industry, who started their careers with either the original Walt Disney or Warner Bros. Studios in the 1930's and 1940's.
Their role was first to time out, or "slug", the non-dialogue portions of each scene. The list of timings would then be handed to a producer to add to the storyboards. As seen below in this page from Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends.
The numbers refer to the Feet and Frames of footage required for each scene.
Meanwhile, the animation directors would prepare the exposure sheets for each scene. These would be detailed frame-by-frame instructions to the overseas' animators. As shown at the link below in these examples from the later seasons of Muppet Babies (From the blog of warburtonlabs): http://warburtonlabs.blogspot.com/2017/02/original-muppet-babies-cels.html
A quick key to the exposure sheets:
The top row would detail the production number, footage length, scene number and sequence number.
The horizontal bold lines, every eighth line down, represent half a foot of footage.
Then from left to right:
Column 1: Represents the path and flow of action
Column 2: Details dialogue, broken down into it's phonetic components
Column 3: Lists the levels of animation. In other words, how many separate cels were required for an individual frame. The maximum number of acetate cels allowed was always five, with the sixth column being the background
Columns 4 and 5: Notes for the Camera Operator including trucking, panning, field size and which background was to be used.
The raw "unslugged" recordings of the dialogue session, once they were available to the sound editors, would then be spaced out to the director's timings to create the full running length of the episode. With the slugged recording available, producers would then know how many scenes would need to be cut in final storyboard revisions.
Once the final storyboard revisions had been decided upon, the storyboards would be packed up. Along with the exposure sheets, model sheets/cels, colour keys, background keys, background layouts and a whole host of other production material and shipped out for animation.
