Storyboarding, Spectacle and Sequence in Narrative Cinema

Abstract

In 1993, Annette Michelson proposed that ‘the last half-century of [cinema]’s development [is] the period in which production design was largely characterized by the adoption of the storyboard’.1 This assertion sees the development starting in the late 1930s, if not a little later, and would tend to confirm the pivotal position of Walt Disney and William Cameron Menzies in the evolution of the form. As we have already seen, Menzies at least was already using similar methods long before this time, though this made him an innovator in methods of pre-production.