Page 204 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Chapter 10

Capture the Magic

with Storyboards

Layer upon layer, we create a patchwork of sketches and words that
color the original idea. Funny, fantastic, diverting, enhancing, persuasive,
serious or not, our visualized thoughts begin to chisel away and uncover
the diamond in the rough. 68
Disney Imagineers

ike many ingenious concepts, storyboarding takes a simple tech-
nique—visual display—and uses it in a unique way to help companies
L solve complex business problems. It is a structured exercise designed
to capture the thoughts and ideas from a group of participants. Their thoughts
and ideas are put on cards and then displayed on a board or a wall. The result,
an “idea landscape,” is more organized than the output from brainstorming,
yet it retains the flexibility that project teams need as they work their way
through the various stages of problem solving and idea generation.
Walt Disney originally conceived the idea that eventually became known
as storyboarding as a way to keep track of the thousands of drawings necessary
to achieve full animation of cartoon features. By having his artists pin their
drawings in sequential order on the studio wall, Disney could quickly see
which parts of a project were or were not completed.
From its genesis in animation, the technique has spread to many other
areas. Advertising agencies now use storyboarding to sketch out commercials
before they shoot them. Scenes from feature movies are often storyboarded for
the next day’s camera work. Editors and art directors utilize storyboards as a

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