Anyone wanting insights into how tho convey their cinematic vision to others would do well to steer clear of this volume.


Amateurish and unfocused   January 18, 2002
 16 out of 16 found this review helpful

After searching for books on storyboarding for a class, I found and read a handful of them. This book was a big disappointment. For readers looking to learn about the CRAFT of storyboarding, I strongly recommend "From Word to Image" by Begleiter. However, if you like personal anecdotes, personal preferences, Hollywood history trivia, uninspiring graphics, and little teaching content, then Mr. Hart's "Art of Storyboard" will give you much of that. I am giving it two stars instead of one, because there are few books on storyboarding and because there is nonetheless some useful content (but it could have been put in 10 pages).


Storyboarding from the simple to the complex   September 24, 2001
 3 out of 6 found this review helpful

This book covers storyboards ranging from the most basic to the most detailed. The author recreates frames from classic films--old and new--to illustrate how a storyboard can include light, movement, perspective, and shadow to offer a more complete view of the scene. I found this book to be as much about the art of observing, which is essential to anyone involved in the filmmaking process.


This is a book about storyboarding?   April 18, 2001
 22 out of 25 found this review helpful

One of the main problems with books about storyboarding is that very few actually outline and explain how to execute it without going into too much theoretics. Like a cookbook, I would like to be instructed step-by-step on how to create storyboards: how to decide which angles best suit a written outline; differences in storytelling metric scenarios (quiet scenes, action scenes, etc.); and what would lead me to decide on how to visually set up a scene properly. All this book does is delve into the loooong history of different films, rambling on and on about significant key storyboard shots in the movie. Unfortunately, none of it is instructional. Worse yet, the examples the author uses are his own pencil sketches, which are lifted from actual scenes from an established movie. This does nothing for his credibility as a storyboard artist, especially if he didn't board the sequences himself. While it is important to explain specific key shots in a film to aspiring artists, using re-drawn sequences to fill an entire book is almost insulting to the very subject one is trying to learn from.