Who am I?

My name is Ben Mansfield and I am an English Storyboard Artist, based in LA. I work primarily on animated feature films at studios such as Netflix and Sony, but have also worked on live action features, kids and adult TV shows and several early development projects. I have previous experience mentoring through ‘Rise Up Animation’ and Independently. 

 

What does a mentoring session look like?

These sessions are for you first and foremost, I’m open to discuss anything you want related to storyboarding and filmmaking but I am primarily geared towards storyboard critiques. I encourage you to bring your own scenes, short films, portfolio pieces or in progress storyboard sequences and we can discuss how to push them to the next level! Here are some of the concepts that we might discuss during a critique:

• Clarity - Storyboards are all about clear communication. Beautiful drawings and stylistic flourish will not smooth over a poorly told story and if an audience is confused, they will leave. We can discuss how to step out difficult concepts, separate competing ideas and create exciting reveals.
• Entertainment - Even a scene that looks plain on the page can be made interesting with good visual choices. By varying and layering different types of motion such as the direction, rotation and smoothness of the camera and the location and actions of the characters within the frame, a simple scene can begin to shine. 
• Blocking/Staging - How you can fully utilize the environment and move the characters within it to tell the story in the most entertaining and powerful way. We can discuss how to approach designing your scene around several key compositional moments and how to naturally move between them. This could involve rethinking how you design your environment to give your characters a strong foundation to work from.
• Camera Moves - When is it appropriate to move the camera? How do you draw convincing camera moves that feel realistic? We can discuss approaches to designing and drawing camera moves such as using top down views, how camera rotation affects perspective and ease-ins and outs that will enable you to explore long takes and even oners in your work.
• Perspective Drawing - A deep understanding of perspective and solid drawing is necessary in storyboarding so that you can place the camera everywhere you can imagine. In addition to storyboards I am also the creator of PerspectiveTools.com and am passionate about discussing and explaining effective tricks for drawing in perspective. Just let me know ahead of your session if you would like to learn more about beginner or advanced perspective techniques.

 

How to prepare for the session?

If you would like advice on a specific project or storyboard sequence that you are working on then please send it to me at least a week before our session so that I can take a look at it and prepare some thoughts. Let me know if there are any specific aspects that you are interested in focusing on and improving. It is not necessary to do this (we can just chat about animation if you’d like), but the more information you can give me ahead of time, the more helpful I will be to you. 

 

One Session or Multiple?

I don’t want you locked into multiple sessions if you don't need them, so my mentorships are done on a session by session basis. If we are able to cover all of your concerns within your first 1 hour session then that's great. If however we get to the end of the session and there is more you want to discuss or perhaps you have a separate project you would like some thoughts on then I encourage you to please sign up for more!