Natalie Nourigat at Lipscomb!

Every semester Lipscomb tries to get a notable person in the animation industry to come speak on campus. And by tries, I mean knocks it out of the park. For a small, liberal arts school in the middle of Tennessee, we’ve been able to get Aaron Blaise, John Musker, and Andreas Deja (wasn’t able to see that one cause I was in high school). It’s one of my favorite parts of the program, and the weekends when they come are always a little wild. Talks and workshops and Q&As drag on and on (in a good way), and all homework gets laid aside because an ANIMATION DEITY has graced us with their presence and everyone just wants to sit at their feet (metaphorically, don’t want to scare that guest away) hoping that their skill and success in some way transfers to us. It’s also a big moment for the southeastern animation community in general. There’s lots of new faces on campus and I’m surprised that the massive concentration of art nerds in one place doesn’t get the attention of the CIA or even a local newspaper. In short, it’s typically the best weekend of the semester. 

This past weekend we had Disney story artist Natalie Nourigat on campus! Natalie was our first notable guest who is fairly new to the industry, meaning that her talk went a bit differently than the other lectures I’ve been to. Usually the animators give a speech they’ve likely presented a few times before at conventions, talking about the stories from the many projects they’ve worked on across several decades. Although Natalie has traveled around the world and done a lot of great comic work, Ralph Breaks the Internet is her only current screen credit. So the talk naturally ended up being a little on the shorter side. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed time for a nearly hour-long Q&A once she had finished speaking and pitching some storyboards. She fielded a lot of questions, some dealing with some particular storyboarding points, but most with more general topics of life as an artist. She also got a lot of difficult questions that I would have handed with a lot less tact, but that she took on gracefully. I remember one particular question about “finding your style” (something that I don’t think about and don’t want others to worry about) which prompted a really thoughtful answer that I could totally get behind. (The short answer being “draw in the styles you like, things will stick around and accumulate and that snowball will become your style.) 

This caricature doesn't really look like her, but here it is anyways.

Natalie describes her work as “participating in story rooms,” which I initially thought was a strange way to say “storyboarding.” But after her workshop, I discovered why she uses this particular wording. While teaching the animation majors about storyboarding on Saturday, Natalie was a lot more concerned with informing us about the non-drawing parts of the story process: team collaboration, idea generation, pitching, and serving the director’s vision. She compared being a story artist to being a menu, offering different suggestions to the director but leaving the ultimate decision up to them. I thought this was a great metaphor, and hearing it has helped me to be less protective of my storyboards and more willing to say no to boards as a director. 

This was also the most hands-on animation workshop I’ve been a part of. We started the morning with some improv games – definitely not what most of the students (and me) are used to but were fun nevertheless – and then got straight into storyboarding using the “Next 5” exercise. We all divided up into teams, each with a director and a set of story artists. Everyone was shown the same photo, which had to be the opening shot of a storyboard sequence. The story artists then drew five storyboards expanding on the photo and turning it into a complete story. We had to do all the drawings in 5 minutes with only a sharpie and paper! These storyboards were then pitched to the director, who used the material generated to direct the story team towards one consistent story idea, which everyone then boarded in 5 minutes (still using the photo as the first shot). And finally, the director pitched her favorite version of the sequence to the whole class. The director position switched around, so everyone had a chance to guide the story. When I do my storyboarding, I spend a lot of time thumbnailing and planning interesting compositions, so the time limit and inability to erase was really challenging to manage at first! But after a few tries I got more comfortable with confident lines and quick visual communication. Here’s an example of one sequence’s progression: 

The picture for this one was a guy walking down the street wearing some kind of giant paper mache animal head, perhaps as part of a parade.

This was my first suggestion to the director, imagining that the man was delusional and lived his entire life as a cat, wreaking havoc upon humans before being ousted by a man wearing a giant dog head.

The director liked another artist’s idea of the man wandering into a birthday party and being mistaken for a piñata. This was my take on that idea showing him getting lost from a parade, eventually being beat up by kids with bats in a cartoony dust cloud and then fleeing the mob.

And these were the final boards for the sequence I directed, which started out with a photo of a Buddhist monk looking up at a statue. I liked the idea of the statue coming to life and the introduction of a stray cat, so I combined the two in a battle of offerings (the monk offering material gifts and candles, the cat something a bit more simple and intangible). Naomi Bethel did these drawings, except for the last one which was done by Ashton Kate:

It was a really great weekend and very inspiring! I was most inspired by Natalie Nourigat’s commitment to quick life drawings in public spaces and cafes, and so I’ve been trying to do more work from life using ink. It’s been a really great way to resist the temptation to ctrl+z. Sorry Lipscomb friends and strangers, you’re about to get drawn! Here’s one of my communications professor, Prof. Prill: 

Hope you guys are doing well! I’m about to reach spring break, which promises lots of time for personal work, and maybe Zelda: Breath of the Wild??? I’m not going anywhere, but I’m going to try to make it fun and meaningful nevertheless! 

-dh

P.S. I have been playing a LOT of the new Smash Bros recently – here’s a really cool jazz cover of its menu theme. I don’t know how many people care for video game jazz covers, but I for one am a Big Fan.