In film, the stage everyone forgets is the one that decides the most. Pre-production is where the look, the tone and the size of a project are set, before a single frame exists. Studios spend months there, researching, drawing and collecting references, because every problem solved on paper is a problem that never reaches the timeline. Motion design and social media work have the same stage, even when it lasts one afternoon.
When people ask how a piece started, they expect to hear the name of a tool. The honest answer is almost always a folder of references. The software comes later, and it goes faster, because the important decisions were already made somewhere else.
A trip to a waterfall
For Up (2009), Pixar sent a group of artists on a three day expedition to Angel Falls, in Venezuela, the waterfall behind Paradise Falls. Pete Docter told the Brazilian press that it took three planes, a helicopter, a jeep and a lot of walking, from Mount Roraima down the river by boat.
Nobody needs a helicopter to make a post. But the idea holds at any size: the best details come from looking at something real, not from remembering what it looks like.
One page for the whole project
When I started Fala, Vô!, in January 2022, the first thing I made was not a model. It was a page. Ideas, reference images for each character and each set, and later the list of shots, all lived there. It sounds like bureaucracy. It was the opposite: working alone, in my spare time, for more than a year, that page was the memory of the project. Every time I came back to it, I knew exactly where I had stopped.
Sort references by what they teach
A pile of images is not a board yet. A board starts to work when every reference is there for a reason you could say out loud. I group mine by the question each one answers:
- Movement. How does it move? The rhythm of a cut, the way a camera drifts, how a crowd walks.
- Composition. Where do things sit in the frame? Symmetry, empty space, what is close and what is far.
- Color and light. How does it feel? Warm or cold, clean or grainy, day or night.
- Texture. What is it made of? Paper, wood, metal, glass, film.
One habit changed how I work: take the movement from a reference, not the look. If you copy the colors and the font of something you like, you get a copy. If you take how it moves and how it is composed, and bring your own colors and type, you get something new.
Structure before the script
For the story, I used the Story Circle, popularized by Dan Harmon: eight steps that fit a short film surprisingly well. You, need, go, search, find, take, return, change. In Fala, Vô!, a grandson adapting to the pandemic needs to keep in touch with his grandfather. He starts recording videos while folding paper planes, turns it into a routine, and then the answers stop coming. With the eight steps on the page, every scene had to answer to one of them.
The same circle works for a thirty second brand film, a carousel or a product launch. Who is this for, what do they need, and what is different at the end?
Cut early, cut on paper
The first version of the story had a dog keeping the grandson company. It lasted a few days. Animating a four legged animal alone would have eaten months, and the dog did not change the story. Cutting it on paper cost nothing. Cutting it after modeling would have hurt.
The storyboard went the same way. I tried to draw one and gave up: drawing is not my strength. Instead, I wrote a shot list, a table with one line per shot: camera position, camera movement, where the character is, what the character does, dialogue, status, render, notes and references. It did the storyboard's job for someone who thinks in lists. Use the method that fits your hands, not the one the books expect.
Next time you open the software first, try the opposite. Twenty minutes collecting references, sorted by what they teach. The first keyframe will come faster, and it will be yours.
This text comes from Felipe Risallah's undergraduate thesis on the production of the 3D short film Fala, Vô! (Cinema and Audiovisual, UFES, 2023). More about the film at the link.