"Prepare to Board" by Nancy Beiman

There is a good deal of cross-over between animation and storyboarding. In the days of traditional 2D animation, many animators were board artists, and vice versa.

Even today, where most of the work we do is digital, traditional drawing skills are very useful for planning animation, by doing quick thumbnail sketches that set out all the key poses in the shot.

One traditional Disney animator who mastered both animation and storyboarding is Nancy Beiman, whose excellent book Prepare to Board! is the main book we recommend to our students.

It is an excellent book from a master animator, who now teaches at Sheridan College in Canada.

Nancy Beiman

Nancy Beiman
Nancy was a supervising animator at Disney (most notably on Hercules) and, like many 2D animators, she does storyboards and character design as well as animation.

There is also a great companion guide to the book available for free here:

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days, take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK.