My Little Pony Beat Boards; Drawings as a writing tool

I want to show you some beat boards I did for the new My Little Pony feature: My Little Pony: A New Generation. (now available on Netflix!) And I’d like to talk a bit about the function of beat boards, and how storyboard artists use drawings to ‘write’ the story.  

During the eight months that I worked on this film in Dublin, the story went through a lot of changes. And that didn’t stop after I left the production. Although the overall storyline is similar to the story I worked on, there have been so many changes that I wonder if any of the thousands of panels I drew for the film found their way into the final animatic. Sometimes people feel sorry for me when I tell them this. They think this means my work wasn’t used. But that’s not how it works. 

In story, especially for features, a big part of of the job is getting it wrong. You try and try, and try again. Your boards aren’t the solution to the problem (the problem being how to tell what story) they are a suggestion. And more often than not story artists come with great suggestions. Scenes you’ll love, character traits that warm your heart, and action set-pieces that thrills you to the bone. But how do these fantastic storyboard scenes work in the overall story? As good as they might be, most of thee suggestions will not make the final cut. 

Feature story is intimidating and confusing: it is long and everything is connected. If you make a tiny change in a scene at the beginning of the story, it might have huge implications later on. I’ve heard people refer to it as a waterbed, if you push it at one point something will come up somewhere else. 

It might be complicated but it can also be a lot of fun. Especially when we get to really play with the story. When we get to deviate from the script and can try things just to see how they will work. It’s a lot like improv. You listen to other people take their ideas, add your own thoughts, pass it on and the story grows organically. So how do story artists write a story? Not with words, but with drawings. Beat boards are simplified storyboards where you only draw the main story beats and leave out the parts in between. Since these are used to pitch ideas and there are less panels to a scene, they are often a bit more detailed than storyboards. 

At the time that I did the beat boards below, the story was different from that in the final film. The earth ponies used their magic stone as a source of energy, it was where they got the electricity to power their trams, TV’s and refrigerators. When Sunny made her way into the power plant the stone lost its power and Maretime Bay was hit by a complete blackout. When Sunny realized that the unicorns also had a magic stone, she set out to ‘borrow’ that stone to fix the problems she believed she’d caused.  At this point there would be an ‘I will fix this’ song. In which Sunny outlined her plan as well as her desire to be accepted by the other earth ponies. 

In the beat boards I explore moving this storyline to the nighttime. I liked the image of Sunny all alone up in the light house, framed by the moon. It would also be a cool to see the light from the unicorns’ stone in the distance. A nice visual way to hand out the information and to get a sense of the distance she’ll have to travel. 

The directors thought it would be a nice gag if Sunny had the weirdly specific dream of someone getting her a cup of coffee, so I came up with a poster advertising coffee as a visual gag that underlined the song’s lyrics.    

It was also decided that we needed more critters in the film, cute little creatures that hang around the ponies. In the final film they are central to Hitch’s character but at the time I made these beat boards it was suggested that maybe Sunny kept one as a pet. Her leaving her pet with a week’s supply of pet food could be a set up for a gag later on. When she made her way home the critter would have grown to monstrous dimensions! (At the time I did these boards there was no design for these critters yet so I just drew a cute hairball with big eyes)  

As Sunny walks behind the houses of Maretime Bay, Deputy Sprout sees her. He follows her as she  makes her way to the wall that enclosed the town for protection (an idea that was part of the story for a long time but is no longer in the final film) and climbs a tree next to it. Sprout orders her to stop but she doesn’t listen and jumps the wall!

The final four panels, where Sprout informs Hitch of what happened are similar to a scene still in the film. I actually also storyboarded that scene, but it was longer than the scene in the final film.