El Tigre Beat Boards by Dave Thomas

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s El Tigre review: the show’s supervising director Dave Thomas also has a blog where he’s posting many examples of his beatboards. Thomas would do between 30-60 pages of these beatboards before the episodes were handed out to the board artists, so he could visually describe how he wanted the action handled. It’s an immense amount of work that most TV directors don’t do, but it’s a good way for the director to take more control over the vagaries of the TV animation process. And the resulting quality speaks for itself. Dave also has an excellent post about his conversion from traditional pencil drawing to an all-digital paperless production using the Cintiq. Personally, I’m waiting for Dave to tell the story of his biggest accomplishment: how he came up with the 99 Cent Super Value Menu.