Megan Lloyd on her fan animatic for Nerdy Prudes Must Die

In Team StarKid's horror/comedy musical, Nerdy Prudes Must Die, the ghost of a high school bully returns to campus to wreak vengeance on the nerds responsible for his death. It’s a hilarious, if harrowing, look at high school social dynamics and the emotional realities of being a teen.

Megan Lloyd is a director and storyboard artist in the American animation industry. Her screen credits include directing on Star Trek: Lower Decks and storyboarding for Dreamworks, Nickelodeon, Marvel, and Netflix. In her spare time, Megan also creates fan animatics of non-animated media on her YouTube account ThirdChildFilms as well as on TikTok, where she currently has over 100 thousand followers.

Megan Lloyd’s fan video for the climactic song of Nerdy Prudes Must Die portrays the story in a way that can’t be captured on stage. Here’s what Lloyd had to say about the production process for these videos, which blend elements of animatics and animation for dramatic effect.

This is so exciting! The first animatic of yours that I saw was a Sapphic fantasy set to a Sabrina Carpenter cover on TikTok.

Megan: Funny, I actually did that video as a break from Nerdy Prudes. And that was a lot of fun to do, also done in Storyboard Pro. That was fan art of the cover that Morgan Clay produced. Because I love her so much as a singer and as a musical producer. It was sort of the first time that I had shared original characters online since college.

Seeing the positive reception, and then what I've been calling the “second wave” when people realize both of the characters are women, has been really gratifying. That’s a story I would love to make into a film.

Jenna: I saw a few of your The Magnus Archive animatics as well. I love how you animated John moping.

Megan: Oh, and he's on the floor.

Jenna: He's on the floor, and then Martin leaves him the cup of tea. I've seen other animatics of that moment, and people can make it a very dramatic, heavy scene. But you went the other way and made it hilarious.

Megan: So I'm so glad you brought that one up. That was actually the first vertical video I did in Storyboard Pro. I work in television animation. We work in widescreen. I did this eight-minute Magnus Archives video of the Season Four finale. I put months and months of work into it. And it did pretty well online.

But I feel like not a lot of people watched it. And, in fact, when I would try to upload it to TikTok, I would just upload it in widescreen, with big black bars at the top and the bottom, and I kept getting copyright warnings. I'd have to write back every time and be like, “No. This isn't a movie. These are my drawings. I drew this.”

But it would be too late, and the algorithm would have buried it and de-recommended it. So I decided I better start trying to make vertical videos. I actually got the Storyboard Pro template from my friend Anna Lencioni, who is one of your Toon Boom ambassadors.

I was talking to her about working in a vertical format. And she's like, “Oh, yeah, I have a custom canvas that I've saved. I'll send that to you.” I've made some scary Magnus Archives and some comedy Magnus Archives since then, just getting used to the vertical format.

How does boarding for the vertical format change your process?

Megan: The acting is the same, and the editing and pacing choices I make are the same. But how I'm using my background, and where I'm stacking my characters is very different.

The number one thing is that I exaggerate the heights of the characters more. Funny that it hasn't changed my camera work much, but it's changed how I designed my characters.

Jenna: It’s interesting that you bring up character design, because I love how you designed The Distortion in your animatic for the episode of Magnus Archives where the archivist is interviewing Michael. When I first heard the episode, I pictured him almost like a cloud of smoke. I thought he wasn’t entirely solid, and was swirling around himself.

Megan: Yeah, I love that. Before I do a project. I'll gather references. [One inspiration was] Eris from Dreamworks’s The Legend of Sinbad. She's someone who will be talking, and then she will turn to smoke and appear somewhere else.

The biggest reason why I did that scene with Michael is he is the thing that scared me the most in all of The Magnus Archives. The combination of Luke Booys’s unsettling acting, and whatever filters the sound designers put it through.

And he is supposed to be an impossible character. He is supposed to be something your mind [can’t understand.] And I think the thing that really cracked it for me in that sequence is when he's laughing, and he's leaving extra faces.

Jenna: Yes.

Megan: The thing with Michael that was a lot of fun is trying to figure out how a frightening character like this would keep surprising the audience. That's actually only half of the clip that I wanted to animate. There's more at the end of that episode.

There was something intuitive in how you performed his movement. Visually it made a lot of sense because the archivist is tied to a chair. So he's still. And then you just have this very flowy character movement in contrast.

Megan: Setting up the camera work and setting up the blocking for the actors in that scene [was interesting.] I didn't want to just do a shot for the archivist’s line, shot for Michael's line, and then just cutting back and forth. So I wanted to bring in this idea of being circled by a shark in the water.

I'm always trying to make sure that Michael is always moving and always drifting, and then John is trapped in his chair. And any time Michael is trying to be sincere, or is trying to tell the truth, he will get to look more human, and any time The Distortion is winning, he'll be twisted and turned down the spiral.

Which brings us to the horror musical Nerdy Prudes Must Die.

Megan: Yes. The scene that I animated is my favorite scene from the show. Nerdy Prudes Must Die is a story about a group of nerds at a high school who, during a prank gone wrong, accidentally kill the school bully. And they cover it up. And because they've killed the bully in what turns out to be a haunted house, he rises from the grave and starts hunting them down one by one.

In the great comedy vein of this is in the original show, after the bully dies, everyone's lives get better. Popular kids actually start to be okay to the unpopular kids, and people who couldn't date before are together. Everyone's just feeling so much better. And Richie, who's one of the characters that I depicted, is the mascot for the school football team. You can actually see his mascot suit sitting in the locker room at the very, very beginning of the animation.

He's just been fully accepted by the football team and befriended by everyone, and he's literally at the highest emotional point he's ever been. And then you hear the bully start to whisper his name. And it moves into this bigger closer, “Nerdy Prudes Must Die,” which sets us up for a horrible Act II, where the bully will start to chase down and kill these nerds one by one.

That's such a great concept for a musical, too. A good ol’ fashioned teenage slasher story, but with comedy.

Megan: A lot of times in slasher stories or horror stories, it is the nerds who get this power. The people who've been picked on, the people who've been powerless their whole lives. You've got Carrie, you’ve got Jason.

And it's so funny in this one, because the bully’s Introduction song in the musical is called “Literal Monster,” because he already has the most power in school. He already can torment people, and then he gets phenomenal cosmic power that he uses for even more evil.

Jenna: I think a lot of horror content circles around teenagers because it speaks to the heightened emotional reality of that age. At that age it can feel like, “Oh, my bully is literally haunting my life and trying to kill me,” even if that's not the literal reality of it.

Megan: And for all of his magical powers in the show, Max [the bully] still kills with bullying. The show opens with the police investigating Richie's death. They're in the school locker room, and they're talking about how this kid got purple nurpled and swirlied to death.

Jenna: That’s gotta be the worst way to go.

Megan: And then the show transitions.

One of the reasons why I think the ending of the actual song Nerdy Prudes is so effective is that they don't actually show Richie getting drowned. They don't actually show him getting tortured and him getting killed. The song itself, like you see in my animation, is just him being chased around the school and the bully lording it over him in this horrible game of cat and mouse.

There's this slow moment in the original stage show where Richie's down on the ground crying, and Max is slowly walking towards him laughing. And the audience is supposed to imagine, okay, he's getting dragged away to die.

And then I thought, “I don't want to show the actual murder. But I do want to show him getting dragged away.” Now we're into the technical camera choice aspect of it. That was actually the last shot it took me to animate, because it's so long, and has so much subtle acting in it.

The very last frame we see of Richie's face, he makes eye contact with the camera. I'm hoping it's too quick to be noticed on your first watch-through. I wanted there to be one fleeting moment where he's able to break the fourth wall and look at the audience.

It definitely toes that line of being horrifying without it bombarding someone scrolling on their feed with obviously disturbing imagery. How long did the animation take to complete?

Megan: I spent about five total months working on this project. I started it back in February with so much hubris in my heart. I started President's Day weekend and I'm like, “I bet this will take me three days to storyboard. I'm going to get this whole thing done in one three-day weekend.”

My original plan was to do just a storyboard for it with limited frames for each shot. When I am boarding, either for work or for myself, if I'm doing it to a song, I'll listen to my source material. If I have a script I will read my script multiple times. And even if it is a song, I will eventually print out the lyrics.

Because the first thing I do is I like to take my script, and I like to mark where I imagine the camera cut. With live action, you have the benefit of filming coverage of your scenes from multiple angles that you can choose from in the edit. With animation, you need to decide on your edit first. That's the primary purpose of storyboards: to determine your camera angles and your actor blocking. A lot of these early decisions are now the responsibility of board artists.

Unfortunately, what we're seeing in the animation industry today is so much of the initial creative workload is being put onto the board artists because jobs like animation timer and layout artist are getting eliminated. Board artists are expected to do layout, to do timing. Think, “#StandWithAnimation” as our negotiations committee is working on their new deal.

Can you tell us more about your production process for this kind of project?

Megan: I'll go through my script. and I will just make a little tick mark every time I picture the camera cutting. If I think of a shot that's ghost-specific, I'll sometimes do a little scribble of it out to the side.

Then I like to work from a sound. I do like to time my boards out. If you listen to my animation, it is the cast recording soundtrack version and the live performance that I spliced together to keep all of the moments of acting I liked more. So if you ever hear a crack of thunder or a big rush of wind, I laid that over the top of it to hide where the sound quality of the recording very obviously changed. I do all my sound editing in Audacity, and I have a few extra layers of effects that were added afterwards in Storyboard Pro.

My first draft of anything is so screwy and so heinous. I have friends who are exquisite thumbnail artists. They could turn in their first draft as a final, and it's only their inner perfectionism that makes them add all of the hair and clothes and everything. My first draft is very scribbly, because in my first draft, I’m mostly working with the timing and the editing of my shots. So I'll do this first rough draft, and sometimes that'll make me change what shots I want.

There's one shot in Nerdy Prudes that changed the most, and it's when Max first picks Richie up off the ground and floats him up above the gym. I had the camera set to the side of them, looking straight at them because I was thinking: “Oh, I've got to use my vertical space. I'll just show them small at the bottom of the screen, and then, like an elevator, I'll show them going straight up.”

And as I moved from my rough stage into my cleanup stage, I'm like, “Yeah, but the camera's been looking kind of square on at the action all the way through. And since this is an action sequence I do want to shake up my camera.” So I ended up changing that to a high shot looking down. I still have Max and Richie start at the bottom of the screen and come towards the top. But now they're also moving towards the camera as well. So they're moving three-dimensionally.

I know the original scene takes place in the locker room. I do start in the locker room and intimate that he gets moved back there at the end. But in the story of Nerdy Prudes Must Die, there is a pep rally that happens just before the big game. Richie dies during halftime at the big game. And I loved the idea of this high point, and then Richie being trapped in this gym with all the trash and everything lying around, because even the janitors are down at the big game. Nobody's cleaning up the pep rally yet.

Then another reason why I wanted to have trash and paper all over the place is because wind is invisible. I wanted wind in several of the sequences. That's why there's so much normal notebook paper on the floor of the gym.

Then I’ll split it up into sequences to work on it more at a time. Storyboard pro is a very robust program, but I don't think it's designed for something this heavy to all be in a single file, especially not with how old my computer is. So my rough draft and my first pass will all be in the same file. And when I'm working in a lot more detailed shots, I'll split that up into shots, or two or three shots at a time. When it's all finished, I'll import them back into my original file. Some of the tools that I love the most on Storyboard Pro is the ability to export, pull shots out, and create new files from them automatically.

I love having the big margins on Storyboard Pro because the biggest note that I get when I board is that I always field the camera in too close. So I'll always draw outside my margins, and then, when I'm going through my final file, I'll just take the camera and widen it out by like 30% across the whole thing.

Storyboard Pro isn't built for compositing or for coloring. That is something you definitely should do in a program like Toom Boom Harmony. But I don't have Harmony yet, so I paint in Storyboard Pro. I have a set of textured brushes that I like to use. I'll literally just change the resolution of the camera and the project settings to be as big as I would have a digital canvas on any kind of other program.

On Nerdy Prudes, originally my goal was just to storyboard it. But then I decided I wanted to animate all of it, which is a lot more frames of a lot more drawings. And I haven't animated anything this complicated since college.

I definitely haven't done anything with lip sync since my Animation 102 class. So I really have to shout out my friend Jess [A.M.] here, who is a professional animator.

One shot in particular that I'm actually really proud of is when Richie stands up to say, “I'm not a loser.” Because that looks like it's a camera move, but everything in that shot is drawn. I'd been working on this shot forever, and I was so happy with the animation I had of Richie.

But I thought there was something missing. So I sent it to Jess and she just suggested, she suggested two extra drawings between when his hands are up to when his hands were down, because my instinct was to make it snappy.

Where do you think the line between animatic and animation is at this point? Is there a definite line?

Megan: For me once you're lip syncing, it's animation. That's the line for me. As a board artist and even as a director this is something I would try to emphasize. I do have board artists I've directed on in the past that just have an excessive number of frames, and something I really try to ask for is in your rough draft, I only want to see one to three drawings per camera cut.

Since storyboarding is in the ideation phase of making a project, it is very possible that you will get notes that could have you either change a small thing or start your sequence over from the beginning. So I would stress to people who are becoming board artists to try not to do someone else's job.

I consider storyboards as if I'm using it to plan something. That's a storyboard. But if I've colored it, and if I've put lights on it, and there's sound, and there's stuff to it, I'm going to start calling that animation. If you look at my earlier stuff, my Magnus Archives stuff, my Hamilton stuff, I did used to call everything animatics, but I am trying more and more to say, “No, this is an animation.”

It's interesting being a board artist. You are a Jack of All Trades for your trade. You are a cinematographer. And you decide where the camera goes and how it's blocked. You are an actor. You have to do the acting for the characters. And even as a board artist you are a director, because you are deciding where your actors are going to walk and what shots are going to be chosen.

So it can be really easy to be like, “Oh, yeah, but I also want to light and shade it. And I want to do even more acting.” This is again where I would caution you to put your love and effort into the moments you're most passionate about. But if you want longevity in a career, I think you need to find a level of consistency that you can do eight hours per day for months at a time.

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• Megan Lloyd's animatics and limited animation projects can be found on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.
• Ready to board your next production or make fan animatics of your favourite musics? Artists can download a 21-day trial of Storyboard Pro.