Beat Boards; Drawings as a writing tool

I would like to show you some beat boards I did for the new My Little Pony feature: My Little Pony: A New Generation. (now available on Netflix!) And I’d like to talk a bit about the function of beat boards, and how storyboard artists use drawings to ‘write’ the story.?

During the eight months that I worked on this film at Boulder Media in Dublin, the story went through a lot of changes. And that didn’t stop after I left the production. Although the overall storyline is similar to the story I worked on, there have been so many changes that I wonder if any of the thousands of panels I drew for the film found their way into the final animatic. Sometimes people feel sorry for me when I tell them this. They think this means my work wasn’t used. But that’s not how it works.?

In story, especially for features, a big part of of the job is getting it wrong. You try and try, and try again. Your boards aren’t the solution to the problem (the problem being?how?to tell?what?story) they are a suggestion. And more often than not story artists come with great suggestions. Scenes you’ll love, character traits that warm your heart, and action set-pieces that thrill you to the bone. But how do these fantastic storyboard scenes work in the overall story? As good as they might be, most of these suggestions ultimately won't fit into the story and will not make the final cut.?

Feature story is intimidating and confusing: it is long and everything is connected. If you make a tiny change in a scene at the beginning of the story, it might have huge implications later on. I’ve heard people refer to it as a waterbed, if you push it at one point something will come up somewhere else.?

It might be complicated but it can also be a lot of fun. Especially when we get to really play with the story. When we deviate from the script and get to try things just to see how they will work. So how do story artists write a story? Not with words, but with drawings. Beat boards are simplified storyboards where you only draw the main story beats and leave out the parts in between. Since these are used to pitch ideas and there are less panels to a scene, they are often a bit more detailed than storyboards.?

The beat boards below are for a song that didn't make it into the film. There were no lyrics written, it was just an idea at this stage. In this version of the story the earth ponies lose their electrical power when their magic stone runs out of magic. The main character Sunny blames herself for this and decides to 'borrow' the unicorns' stone to bring power back to Maretime Bay.

I wanted to explore moving the action to the night time, I liked the image of Sunny alone in the lighthouse framed by the cold moonlight. As she makes her way to the wall that surrounds the town (no longer in the film) Deputy Sprout see her and watches her jump over it. He then runs back to the sheriff's office to tell Hitch what happened. an slightly different version of he scene with Hitch and Sprout is still in the film.