Sam Horton - Storyboarding Masterclass

 Sam Horton

Storyboarding Masterclass

16th November 2021

On the 16th of November 2021, Sam Horton held a storyboarding masterclass and Q&A which I attended that took place virtually over microsoft teams. Sam Horton is a story board artist who has provided boards for a range of CGI, stop motion and 2D animation projects, across feature films, broadcast series and commercials over the last nine years. Sam has worked with companies such as Aardman Academy Tutor, Jellyfish Pictures, Wild Seed Studios, Funko, Bluezoo and many more however he works mostly with Aardman Animations.

I learned a lot from this virtual masterclass about how to storyboard, what programmes to use and the history of story boarding. I definitely know more about the media industry because of this talk, I was taught that a lot of directors have a hand in storyboarding so that they can perfectly execute what they envision. Sam showed us previous storyboards from directors such as Martin Scorcese the film Taxi Driver, Alfred Hitchcock for a scene in the film Psycho. Also Ridley Scott for the film Alien which went on to earn the film a higher budget, this taught me that the film industry heavily relies on storyboarding to bring a film to life and in the end this could make or break the way a film turns out. This helped me think more about potential careers in this part of the media industry as i knew very little about storyboarding as a whole before this talk, but now i know that there are many jobs available in storyboarding. This masterclass has most definitely helped me with my current project as Sam enlightened me on how to construct a storyboard, whilst telling me what features to add to create the best storyboard you can. Sam also told us the programmes that he uses to create his storyboards, this is really helpful as i can look at these softwares and maybe even have a go at creating my own storyboard using them. Sam informed us that when making a storyboard you must ask lots of questions to the directors and producers, you also must know your script back to front and make lots of notes. Overall i thoroughly enjoyed this masterclass with Sam Horton and i feel i learned a lot about storyboarding and the media industry as a whole.