Wren Petkov on the value of mentorship and raising the stakes while storyboarding

Wren Petkov, recent National Film School graduate and 2025 Toon Boom Ambassador, participated in a livestream to discuss the making of two of their personal projects: an action-packed animatic chase scene in A Starter on the Loose, and a stylish character-driven storyboard sequence titled Spring Dance. 

Wren shares their journey from film school to studio work, with thoughts on what animation schools get right, the importance of mentorship, and the challenges of stepping into a studio role. Along the way, they break down the role Storyboard Pro plays in their workflow, discussing challenges around cinematic composition in 2D production pipelines. They also reflect on how showing what you know gives great power to storytelling — from folklore of their native Bulgaria to the works of Miyazaki and drawing inspiration from seaside towns.

This article is an excerpt of the original conversation. In the full livestream interview, you can get a close look behind Wren’s process in Storyboard Pro.

 

Congratulations on graduating from Ireland’s National Film School, on your thesis film, and also on your new studio job! What was your film school and mentorship experience like?

Wren: It was really interesting. I feel like I have a lot of hot takes, as I told you earlier, but I think my biggest takeaway was how unprepared modern film schools are to get people ready for the job. But also just how fun of a space it is for someone to explore what they can make, the types of films they're curious to make, and the types of stories they want to tell. 

My experience was very mixed in those ways. I feel like everything I learned about filmmaking was mostly from mentorships and courses that I took online and outside of school. Then school was really good for meeting awesome friends and expanding my network and figuring out what I wanted to do with myself in the first place.

Was there an adjustment when moving from school or mentorships into a studio role?

Wren: The thing I was least prepared for was the mix of people that you're going to be working with, in terms of experience levels and backgrounds. Everybody's got all these preconceptions. In art school, we were all in it together, and we're all at the exact same level. But in the studio, everybody's working on different productions, different kinds of shows, so that's really interesting, because you might be talking about the same thing, or think you're talking about the same thing with somebody, but in your heads it's a completely different image. Or even a completely different subject.

The other thing I was kind of unprepared for was how little training there is on the job, especially nowadays. A lot of us come out of art school thinking they're going to hold my hand and talk me through everything. But my experience, at least, has been much more — you're thrown into the deep end, and you just figure it out. And if you can't figure it out, then that's too bad.

At the same time, I feel like I’ve learned so much in the past six months of working, and it just feels nice to be improving and getting to study from everybody at a studio.

We wanted to discuss some of your recent projects, including the chase scene animatic from A Starter on the Loose. What was your goal with this project?

Wren: I had recently been to Paris when I started my mentorship with Raj from Callahan, who's a Netflix feature story artist. I’d been super inspired by the architecture. I have some family there as well, so Paris always feels very homely to me. While I was there and I was café sketching, I got a call from my roommate that my sourdough starter had exploded in the fridge –- after I obviously hadn't fed it for a little bit.

I thought that this feels like a really nice combination of things. I wondered what I could do with this as a sequence. During the mentorship, I was given the prompt: How can we emotionally involve the audience as quickly as possible into an action piece? This is something Raj always says, that you can deliver so many punches and make the best action scene, but if the audience doesn't care about the characters or the drama, then you're probably not going to have a great piece in the end.

Those were the two things I really wanted to try. I wanted to guide the audience through a scene that's probably not as faithful to Paris as it could have been, but I prioritised the audience experience. How can I escalate the scene? How can I guide the action and build the geography of the city to fit what's happening on screen at every given moment?

I went through a very iterative process. I was first working off a real map of Paris, and then I drew my own map and figured out a different geography — sort of my own alternate Paris — that I could set varying elevations in. Because Paris is a pretty flat city, and I really knew I wanted to explore a bit of verticality, as you’ll see in the excerpt.

"Escalation" is a really good word. As the animatic goes from a foot chase to weaving through the streets on a scooter, the starter gets larger and larger. 

Can you take us on a tour of the sequence from the animatic, and maybe we can talk about the parts that you’re most proud of?

Wren: Yeah. This is just after we’ve introduced the characters and the drama of it all. 

This is about Micah, who is the son of a famous baker in Paris, on the day of the big Bread Festival – which does not happen in real-life Paris, you’ll be sad to find out. In my alternate Paris, every year there’s a huge bread baking festival where all the bakers from throughout France gather to celebrate baking. 

Micah accidentally sets this starter on the loose through the streets of Paris. And for anyone who hasn’t owned a sourdough, you need to feed them, and as they get fed, they get bigger. Then you take part of it, and that’s what you bake. But in this case, the starter decides it wants to grow as much as it can.

This is the excerpt we’re going to run through. This is just after it escapes through the window. It’s going to break the glass.

Can you talk about how you upped the stakes, showing the world around the character getting bigger as the starter grows?

Wren: I was super inspired at the time by George Saunders’ book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where he talks about this idea that each scene needs to escalate. Even if you’re repeating a motif, it needs to be different in each section.

That’s actually why I fictionalised my Paris, so that we’re not just running through generic buildings or streets. We’re going through distinct areas of the city. We start out on the street, then we go through the market, then the staircase that leads to the entrance up in front of the Eiffel Tower.

I was really trying to keep things interesting and raise the stakes at each moment. One of the things I was unhappy about in this sequence, and something I’ve tried to improve in later work, is that I felt each location wasn’t specific enough. I’ve definitely worked on that since.

You mentioned this was a project that helped you get into a studio, which is amazing. To take a mentorship course, get feedback, and then have that turn into something that lands you a job…

Wren Absolutely. I actually wrote a whole essay about this on my blog. It was a really interesting experience getting feedback from different studios that I pitched this to. Each studio aligned with it differently; I got one kind of feedback from one place, another from someone else.

In the end, the job I did end up getting, they specifically mentioned in the interview that they really loved the sequence. That’s why I specifically love mentorships and courses. I think film schools, for the most part, don’t really have a current pulse.

We were just chatting before we hopped on the livestream about how the most common advice used to be “don’t draw anime,” but now anime is what gets you hired. I think film schools can be a little out of touch. Getting feedback on your work, or being guided by someone who’s actually working in the industry, is invaluable.

You mentioned that you’ve been working on a new animatic, Spring Dance. What led to that project?

Wren: I don’t think I’ve posted about this yet. I’ve been taking a course with Stephanie Stein, who directed Kung Fu Panda 4, and this has been the sequence I’ve been working on through her mentorship. It’s been really interesting because of her experience and understanding of story structure. She has all these amazing stories from working in different studios and with different artists.

I wanted to make a sequence that was a little more specific, with more distinct origins. I told a story about my culture and my home country, which is Bulgaria. Bulgaria has this very specific tradition of the kukeri dancers; these masked, bell-carrying warriors who protect people from evil spirits. I wanted to see if I could tell the story from the perspective of one of those spirits, and ask, are they really evil, or are they just trying to exist?

It’s about a girl who goes on a date with a guy, and he’s unsuspecting that she’s a spirit. I’m actually finishing it today and tomorrow, and I’m pitching it on Saturday to a room full of directors from across the field. 

I’m super excited to share more. I could even show you some of the stuff inside my Storyboard Pro file. I think Storyboard Pro has a very TV-centric reputation, but I actually know a lot of people who use it in animated feature films. I’ve been working with it forever, and I think it’s been getting more and more feature-film-oriented tools and features. I would love for that to continue, because I think it can definitely be super useful. It’s a big step up from using Photoshop.

 

One of the elements that divides TV boards from feature boards is that you tend to see a lot more light and shadow in a feature storyboard. Was that true to your experience?

Wren: That’s something I’ve definitely been thinking about and trying to do more with this sequence. Especially if you look at someone like Inna Bando’s stuff, who I think also works in Storyboard Pro, it tends to be so full of — I think the old master stuff, like Kurosawa — it all looks very cinematic.

I found that in feature films, you’re much more encouraged to use blurs and use depth in your shots, to create these multi-plane compositions, because you’re allowed more freedom to move the camera in 3D. That’s been one of my big experiences, which I think is pretty universal.

The other thing is the bigger focus on more elaborate shots. For example, in a TV production, I don’t know if I would necessarily be allowed to do a shot like this, where there are dozens of incidental characters all dancing together. That would be pretty difficult, but here I have the freedom for it. 

This is something I learned from Stephanie Stein actually, as this is how she does her boards whenever she is still boarding. I just have a little text layer up there that I can type stuff into if I need to, and I can just turn that off on things that don’t need it.

I love that I can colour-code all my panels. I usually do green for clean, yellow for stuff that needs a bit more work, and then red for stuff that’s fully rough. This here would actually be a thumbnail - I’d want to push his expression a bit and clean him up more.

Our relationship with monsters has changed considerably over the last few decades. Monsters used to be more of an external embodiment of a fear, like greed or isolation. But now we tend to identify with monsters. What if this thing feared by everyone just wants to exist?

Wren: I totally agree. The themes of marginalisation, and who gets pushed out, and who’s seen as a monster, have always been important to us. But especially nowadays, it feels very relevant. I really wanted to tell the story of somebody who isn’t approved of by society, but maybe just wants to live in peace. That was my original inspiration.

There were different versions of this where I experimented with her being more monstrous-looking, but I settled on this design because I still wanted us to relate to her, to read her expressions, and understand how she’s feeling. While there are ways to show how someone less humanoid is feeling, I felt that wasn’t the challenge I wanted to take on with this particular board.

As a storyboard artist how do you feel about that balance between wanting to be kind to the rest of the pipeline and wanting to do something really ambitious?

Wren: I really ran into that with my thesis film. I’d always believed that things shouldn’t be storyboarded with animation in mind. I really didn’t set myself up very well. I was boarding thinking about the craziest thing I could do. I ended up with a film that’s mostly crowd shots, a lot of action, and then having to figure out how I’m going to animate it.

I ended up animating a few crowd shots and then scrapping all that animation, because I found that the main character got lost. It was less readable if the crowd was moving, so I replaced them with mattes in the end.

That was a really interesting experience, and it converted me a bit more to the 3D animation camp. I don’t have much experience with 3D, but I like the appeal of doing anything with the camera, to have as many characters on screen as you want, and not having to worry about whether they’re moving or whether it’s a matte.

I don’t think I actually prepared to show my film, but I can flash it on screen if that would be interesting.

How would you describe your experience participating in a mentorship program, and how do you feel it affected your practice as an artist?

Wren: Finishing this current course I’m doing with Stephanie was kind of insane. It might have been the best experience of my life. Working in a really tight-knit group of people, I think there were ten of us total. Everybody has a different experience level, comes from a different culture, a different background. I had looked up to a lot of my classmates before the course, and we became friends. It has almost a college feel, except smaller, more intimate like a little film workshop. You meet twice, sometimes three times a week. You get to pitch what you want to do and what you want to change.

I think the biggest thing I learned in terms of craft was prioritising acting and a character’s truth. Stephanie had this exercise she always told us to do called “Good Friend, Bad Friend.” As you’re writing a dialogue scene, or anything about your character, you first imagine being their good friend, and then imagine being the bad friend — which could be a source of anxiety, or jealousy. If you have these two perspectives in mind, it gives you so much more nuance and a better understanding of who your character is. It changes the acting completely.

This shot from Spring Dance was something a bunch of friends helped me with. They touch hands. She’s a little hesitant at first. Then there’s a jolt that goes through her body. She smiles. He smiles back. I wouldn’t have come up with that without thinking about how each character is feeling, what their headspace is. I’ve learned so much from that, and I want to do more of it. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface.

Looking back, do you have advice for storyboard artists who are interested in boarding chase scenes?

Wren: Everything we’ve just said would’ve been mind-blowing to me six months ago. I’d start with: how do you create depth in a character? How do you bring out the best in them, and how do you incorporate that into a chase scene?

Especially if it’s action… how do you make the audience care? How do they know how the character’s feeling? That’s why in Mission: Impossible, it’s not just punch-punch-punch; it’s punch, punch, reaction shot. You need to know how the character feels about what just happened. That was one of the biggest things I learned. 

I’d also say spend time developing the character designs and figuring out the best contrast. For example, if I was to redo the scene, I’d love to emphasise the size difference more. The sourdough starter gets bigger at the end, but I would have made it bigger throughout. Like, if it were the size of a truck halfway through, that would’ve been fun. Potentially throw more gags there; maybe it eats someone and has to spit them out. Thinking ahead more would’ve been helpful.

For other people, I’d say use as much reference as you can. Make a story that’s personal to you. My first sequence in Stephanie’s mentorship was set just outside my house, in my area. I live in a little seaside town, and I set a piece on the docks with characters moving around. A lot of the backgrounds were based on actual photos I took.

That makes things so specific, so interesting. Miyazaki has this three-metre rule: don’t use anything as inspiration that’s more than three metres from you. I don’t think it’s meant literally, but in the documentaries, he talks about how he tries not to look at the internet, art books, or other people’s films. He wants it to be personal, specific. Ponyo was set just outside his summer house, and you can see the actual locations in the documentary. That’s why they feel so unique. That’s why people get drawn into them.

My favourite artists and the ones I admire most are the ones who do that.

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• Want to see more of Wren Petkov’s projects? You can follow Wren on Instagram, check out their portfolio and read their blog Wren’s Story Notes.
• Interested in a running start boarding on your next chase scene? Artists can download a 14-day trial of Storyboard Pro.