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Ariel VH on drawing characters for storyboards

by Jenna Pearl - February 2, 2023
Artist Profile Storyboard Pro

Unconventional career paths aren’t unusual in the animation industry. Ariel Vracin-Harrell started at the age of twelve, when she participated in a summer animation program for kids at Cal State. Now a seasoned professional, Ariel's first job in the animation industry was as a storyboard revisionist on Star vs. the Forces of Evil, after a director came across her fan art for the show. 

Since then she joined Big City Greens as a storyboard artist for the series and assistant director on the upcoming film. Ariel recently posted a guide for drawing the characters for boards that she developed for the show and upcoming movie, which served as a template for artists new to the Big City Greens crew. 

We sat down with Ariel to discuss the craft of storyboarding, the many pathways to become a professional in the animation industry and the roles that an online presence can now play in an industry artist’s career.

Let’s start at the beginning. When did you decide you wanted to get into storyboarding?

Ariel: My story’s a little bit weird, a little unrepeatable. There is a local college called Cal State L.A. that used to offer a program for high-achieving students. So when I was twelve years old, they were offering summer classes for kids that were gifted or had higher test scores. They offered as a summer program an intro course to animation. That was something I was really interested in. 

I always liked drawing. I drew comics in notebooks at school. And I always doodled things. So I kept pursuing that because it seemed like the most fun and enjoyable thing to do. 

I ended up continuing to take college courses until I graduated when I was seventeen. By then, I was too over-qualified for internships and also legally too young to work anywhere. This was back when they said, “2D animation is dead.” Maya was first being passed around. So I didn’t actually learn a lot about storyboarding. 

I was working food jobs for a while, and I ended up online collecting info myself. I was part of an Invader Zim fan forum, and we were all trying to learn how to animate lost episodes. People like the Adventure Time crew were posting their storyboards, and I kind of reverse-engineered how to do that. I studied how notation and stuff works from the stuff people would post online. That’s how I kind of ‘faked’ my way into learning how to storyboard. 

People get hired in the strangest ways. I got my first job because there was a fan art satARTday for Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and I really liked the show at the time. One of the directors on the show saw my fan art and messaged me, “Hey, are you interested in taking a board test?” He saw that I had applied to the Nick Artist Program and things like that before, and I had some board samples on my website. But I hadn’t really worked anywhere yet.

So I got hired as a revisionist. A lot of people, more and more, are getting hired through online connections. You used to have to send in a portfolio, or check a job portal, or physically send in stuff. But that’s almost archaic. I don’t think it ever works like that anymore, to be honest. 

Ariel VH's animatic for the Broken Karaoke episode 'Call Me Mabel', featuring Mabel from Gravity Falls.

How would you describe your career path up to this point?

Ariel: I feel like it ends up being a lot of weird coincidences. I worked on Star vs. the Forces of Evil as a revisionist, and then I was promoted to board artist during the final season. I really loved being a revisionist and it was something I feel that I had a real knack for. So I helped do a demonstration and helped set up the Amphibia revisions team, because for the first season they didn’t really have revisionists. 

Then, while I was finishing all that stuff, one of the creators of Big City Greens reached out to me and said, “Hey, I like your stuff. Would you be available to tap in for a rotation? We need some people.” And that’s just how it worked: word-of-mouth, being passed back and forth a little bit, friends saying, “Hey, I know you. You seem like a good fit.” 

Now I’ve been at Big City Greens. We’re working on a movie, and I was promoted to the assistant director on that project because I knew the show from being there for so long.

What effect has your online presence had on your career?

Ariel: It helped with everything. Social media is in such a weird place right now. I feel like everyone’s trying to jump off of the main three — Twitter especially, but also Instagram and Tumblr. They’ve all changed so much. 

But I feel like it really helped to grow my circle of friends. There are so many people that I almost know better online than in real life, because of how seldom we end up meeting up. But it’s always fun to say to people, “Oh, I followed you from when you worked on this show, and it’s so cool seeing you work on other projects.” 

But everyone, maybe once or twice, has had that itch to hit the self-destruct button and start from scratch. You’re almost exhausted by social media. There’s just so much noise. You’re used to getting input from so many different voices and hearing so many different opinions about yourself or your work or your colleagues’ work, and you can reach a point where you’re almost like, “I don’t want to hear anyone’s opinion on anything.”

So on the one hand, social media has certainly helped with my career. And I know it’s instrumental to a lot of people’s careers. But sometimes it’s a burden. It’s just extra noise. But you rely on it. I just wish there was a way to streamline all that stuff. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. 

Selected storyboard samples from Big City Greens season 2 by Ariel VH.

How do you approach new storyboarding assignments? 

Ariel: Usually I take a board and I ruminate on it for a while. I read it once, and then I kind of don’t do anything for a few days, if I’m being honest. I immediately get a sense for what I know I want to do and what I don’t, but it takes that last-minute anxiety push for me to physically write it down and to solidify it. 

Then I sit down. I usually have ideas for what sort of jokes and stuff I want to add or what sort of imagery I want to use right away. Since I spent so many years as a revisionist, I would try to draw everything perfectly from the beginning, and I can’t stress enough how much you shouldn’t do that. Now I always board digitally, but I need to physically do thumbnails in a notebook, just so I can get the stick figures out.

Sometimes, if I really can’t think of anything funny to add to a board or to a script, I just zone out think about staging first. Sometimes you can instinctively tell what’s going to work and what won’t. So sometimes I’ll think, “I can’t think of anything for this. It’s probably going to end up being cut.” And I’m usually right! You just develop a sense for that, once you start doing this long enough.

Part of the fun challenge is figuring out what’s going to be a funny or easier way to get what needs to be done in this scene. Sometimes that means cutting out a convoluted plot point or simplifying a paragraph into a word. Or the opposite, where you have line like, “And then they fight,” and you have three minutes of action boarding, and you have to think of imaginative ways to choreograph stuff like that. 

It’s a balance of making jokes versus what’s economically possible.

Which projects have been particularly challenging or interesting to storyboard?

Ariel: The Star vs. the Forces of Evil movie, because it was a movie and I had never worked on a project for so long before. I think my very first assignment was also one of my most challenging, because my very first board assignment ever was a mid-season finale that included a bunch of new characters, a huge fight scene, and a musical number, and it took place in a huge coliseum. But it was fun! And it almost came easily because I was so eager to prove myself. 

This movie has been one of my biggest challenges so far, because it’s so interesting working in such a huge group. You start out by offering thumbnails for a big story, and then you’ll see what you did be completely taken apart and redone. But you see that the changes are better. It’s so different from where I began but it’s actually taking shape into something better. We joke every day that this is the best that the project has ever been.

I’m working right now on a part where I did it in January of this year [2022] and it barely resembles itself, because I can see my drawings and I can see different directors’ drawings. It’s interesting balancing several people’s visions into one project. 

What are some of the challenges of being a storyboard artist?

Ariel: Storyboarding is so different from how it used to be, where it was mostly about character acting, or writing jokes or stories. Now, we’re layout artists, we’re timers, we’re animators, we’re our own revisionists. A lot rests on our shoulders. 

It’s difficult because we have to design backgrounds and props and characters. And the deadlines keep getting shorter and shorter. But if you have a good director, and you have a good team to work with, it becomes manageable. 

The more conversation there is between your team, the easier it goes. I’ve worked with a lot of introverts, where we’re all off in our own corners doing things. And then in the cubicle next door there’s a team that’s at the same table, they’re drawing and exchanging notes. Those teams, they’re magical. It’s like sharing jokes with a friend. That vibe was really brought to a halt with the pandemic. 

What’s so interesting about working on a movie is I’m doing things that I would normally never advise TV board artists to do. We’re practically animating. And it looks really cool, because it’s for a movie, adding things like timing and antics and multiple mouth poses — there’s usually never time on a TV show. And it shouldn’t be our jobs on TV shows to animate that stuff.

You’ve posted your guidelines for storyboarders on Big City Greens online. Why do directors share guidelines for storyboard artists? What was the process of developing those guidelines like?

Ariel: For our movie team, we have so many new people being brought in that have so many different backgrounds. Big City Greens has a simple style, but it’s also deceptively hard to get it right. A lot of people, when they’re starting with a new style, the first instinct is to try to follow the model sheet as much as they can, and sometimes it ends up looking stiff. I was trying to set something up for all the new people - and for the show too, because we have a lot of new people who are working on the show. 

Big City Greens is a fun show to draw for because all the characters are kind of chunky and little, as opposed to more realistic shows. I personally don’t see the point of drawing every single detail of the outfit. It’s practically like looking at the model sheet moving around like they’re puppets. I don’t think that’s necessary and I think it takes out a lot of the artist’s personality when people do stuff like that. 

I just made the guidelines by myself. This was something I was thinking about doing anyway. I’m working on a guide for storyboard revisions — just some terminology and stuff that people might not know. I enjoy explaining this stuff because I’m very passionate about it. I make these guides based on what I see is a struggle for some people.

Can you tell us why shorthand, drawing simplified versions of characters, is important for storyboarding? With that in mind, what kinds of details are generally important to keep?

Ariel: A lot of it is about saving time and energy for the artist. I used to be so hung up on all the details of a character. And it was fun at first, being able to draw all these different things. But it was such a time-waster. Learning how to simplify and get down to the character and the gesture of a drawing is, I feel, more important than necessarily being on model. 

There are a few things that always need clarifications. I feel like the most important things are eyes and hands. Hands are usually the first things that get messed up. I'm so guilty of drawing a little scribble, or drawing a mitt and then drawing little lines on it to make it seem like there are fingers. Hands are so hard to draw because we know what looks wrong and what looks right. So any clarification on hand posing is always important. 

For eyes and expressions especially, if you don’t draw something that’s clear and specific, the eyes look kind of buggy and weird. If you aren’t specific, it’ll end up coming back generic. 

Are there tools or workflows in Storyboard Pro that you wish more board artists, revisionists or directors knew about?

Ariel: For the most part, I use all the default settings. There’s a script that deletes hidden and empty layers. When you’re on a big group project, any way of freeing up space makes it so much easier for everybody else, especially if you’re sending files back and forth. I love using the cutter tool — it’s so easy to clean up line art. 

But I kind of do it the barebones way — using the basic default brush, sometimes turning onion skin on and off if I’m looking back and forth at a panel. I don't think you necessarily have to get fancy with your setup. A lot of people love to get fancy with camera animation or timeline animation in Storyboard Pro. I think it depends on the project, but I don’t think it’s necessarily what’s going to make or break it.

What advice do you have for artists looking to get into storyboarding?

Ariel: A lot of people I know recommend trying to draw stuff from movies or reading books, things like that. For me, I feel like staging is a big part of it, but you also have to be a funny writer. You don’t need to be a perfect draftsman or the best artist on the team as long as you can make characters feel believable. Having a genuine, funny voice is the most important.

There are two resources I always look back to because it helped things click for me. Flooby Nooby has that huge storyboard reference website, and they have an excruciatingly long page that goes into everything about storyboarding. They break every single down. They have tons of images that you can look at. 

There’s also this book called Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. I don’t know why, but this is the book that really helped ‘click’ gesture drawing for me. It’s a little outdated. It’s a little old-fashioned. But it really broke down, into the simplest form, how you can make characters look appealing and believable. I think that’s a huge part of it. 

Watch cartoons, study boards and watch things that aren’t cartoons. Watch bad cartoons too, and make reverse-rules out of that. There’s no wrong way of learning it, just as long as you observe and try to absorb anything you can glean. 

  • Want to see more of Ariel VH's work? You can find her storyboard portfolio on her website and follow her on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
  • Interested in using Storyboard Pro for your next project? Artists can download a free 21-day trial.
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