Pod Insights WHAT WENT WRONG Below The Line - Storyboard Artist (Shaft, Nightcrawler, Free Guy) About this episode Storyboard artist Warren Drummond (Shaft, A Beautiful Mind, Nightcrawler, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) has worked with some of the greatest filmmakers of our time, from John Singleton to Denzel Washington and Ron Howard. In this Below the Line interview, Warren illuminates the world of storyboarding, his journey into film, the transition from analog to digital, and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:12 Chris Winterbauer? Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one. And of course, it would be even more impossible to make them without the job that our special guest today performs. And I'm going to kick it over to David, who's guest hosting with me this evening for another Below the Line interview. David, would you do the honors of introducing our guest?
1:40 Speaker 02 Absolutely. So our guest today is the incredibly accomplished storyboard artist Warren Drummond, hailing originally from Jamaica, Queens. He worked his way up from low-budget films like The Drop Squad and Above the Rim to major Hollywood productions, including longstanding collaborations with John Singleton, Denzel Washington, and Adam Sandler. His filmography spans the dramatic, like A Beautiful Mind, comic book adaptations, like The Amazing Spider-Man and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., science fiction, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Ad Astra, and even horror, working with David Gordon Green on his Halloween reboot. Warren hit us up on Instagram after our Boys in the Hood episode, having been a longtime collaborator with John Singleton. And we looked at his credits and we just knew that we had to try and book him if we could.
2:25 Speaker 03 Singleton was the dude. I worked with John for 20 years.
2:30 Chris Winterbauer? Singleton was the man. Well, Warren, thank you so much for being here today. We are so excited to talk about the job of a storyboard artist. And so we wanted to start, as we do in these interviews, in the simplest terms possible, as if you were describing it to a three-year-old, or maybe a five-year-old, or one of our family members who doesn't work in film.
2:50 Speaker 03 Okay.
2:50 Chris Winterbauer? What does a storyboard artist do?
2:53 Speaker 03 What I do is I help the director visualize his or her film project. I help them figure out the shots they're going to use, the transition of shot to shot. Start on wide shot, Shaft walking down the street, camera pushes in to reveal John Shaft. Camera moves left to right. We stay with him and then reverse shot as we are introduced to blah, blah, blah. And then tracking shots. And we do all that. Now, directors work differently. Some have shot lists, some don't. So I'll go into that. That's basically it, just to help them visualize how it's going to appear on the screen and what shot comes after what.
3:37 Chris Winterbauer? So effectively, you're taking what's in the director's head.
3:41 Speaker 03 Yes.
3:41 Chris Winterbauer? And you're helping them put it down to paper so that the rest of the crew can get a sense of what the director's after. So you're almost like the translator for the director, in a sense.
3:52 Speaker 03 Yes. Basically, I work with directors. I work with cinematographers. I work with stunt coordinators. And every so often, the production designer. So if it's a stunt scene, I might just work on stunts and helping them budget the stunts. I might even work with the effects supervisor because they may want to have which shots will have visual effects or not. Which will be a green screen, so that will help them budget things out. When I was on Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift. Myself and the other board artists helped the second unit director, the great Terry Leonard,
4:32 Speaker 03 know how many days it would take to shoot a certain scene based on how many setups and shots that would be via our studio boards.
4:41 Speaker 02 I think at the top of this, you said that, you know, some directors don't have shot lists or maybe don't have as meticulous shot lists.
4:49 Speaker 03 Right.
4:50 Speaker 02 When you're doing your job or you're working with a team, are there times where you are just going off of the script or is there always some sort of assignment that is very clear on, you know, what exactly you're drawing on a given board?
5:03 Speaker 03 You usually will have an assignment. I'm usually not just going off and doing stuff. I guess when I did A Brother Rim, which I had a good timeline, but a lot of times I was kind of left off on my own. It was my, only my second movie. So we didn't have a lot of time together. He was off, you know, working with the cam department or the A D. So I was kind of like, I'll just draw this, this scene all by myself because I really didn't have a lot of feedback on that particular film. On other movies, even if I start a scene by myself, come up with something, once I've done that, then I'll have a full meeting with the director on the Halloween movies. David will let me get
5:48 Speaker 03 a first pass. So let's say for the 2018 Halloween movie, there's a scene, there's a woman in the bathroom and the Michael Myers character, he attacks her in the bathroom. We had a really brief conversation of what was going to go on and then he let me come up with, with the shots.
6:06 Speaker 02 Wow.
6:07 Speaker 03 And David and I work on feature films. We work on TV shows like Righteous Gemstones and we do commercials also. So right now he is my main guy that I work with because we work on all platforms. So David trusts me enough to come up with, with the first pass and then he will elaborate and then Dave will say, okay, how about this to have this and that, but he will give me a first pass. Denzel always gave me a first pass.
6:38 Chris Winterbauer? Okay, so with David, so on Halloween Kills, how do you do a first pass on like the fireman massacre scene at the beginning of that movie, which is so wild?
6:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:48 Chris Winterbauer? And it's in your book and it's amazing.
6:50 Speaker 03 That was a scene where he did have an idea. He did want to have a shot going from this fireman, who was an axe, this fireman, he's got a, he has a hole, this fireman has that pick thing. That may be, as a matter of fact, the most back and forth that we've had as far as action scenes in a movie. So he was in fact very involved down to the shot of the firemen's POV of Michael Myers coming out of the house, the house on fire, and he's in his silhouette. He really knew what it was after there.
7:24 Chris Winterbauer? Those boards are worth the price of the book alone because it's a really ridiculous sequence in the movie and you can see all of it on the page with your drawings.
7:32 Speaker 03 Thank you.
7:33 Speaker 02 I'm going to jump in as the naive film composer here because in my job, I get involved relatively late in post-production, whereas you are involved in early pre-production. So I'm curious, in terms of who is seeing these storyboards, are they ever shown to the actors? Are you, are you at all in contact with costume designers and set designers? Or are you even before that point?
7:59 Speaker 03 I'm really early. Every Blue Moon costumes may want to see what I'm coming up with shot-wise, but they're really not part of the picture. Actors are never part of it because actors shouldn't be because it can also affect their performance if they think they have to act, if they see a storyboard. And I've got to do that when they should be just worrying about the character or mainly what the director's after.
8:26 Speaker 02 Right, it's almost like temp music for, for a composer. It's like you don't want to be influenced by anything you've seen beforehand.
8:32 Speaker 03 No, and we've seen how that might turn out. I'm a big soundtrack fan, so.
8:37 Speaker 02 Right.
8:37 Speaker 03 Not a good thing.
8:39 Chris Winterbauer? Right.
8:39 Speaker 03 So yeah, I'm really early. Sometimes on film projects, it's just me and the director and they don't, they have the cast, anyone. Other times I have come in the middle of a film that's already filming and they realize they have to storyboard a certain scene that they had planned out. And sometimes it's just right after they hire people and I'm still in the planning stages for the movie.
9:05 Chris Winterbauer? So let's go back to the beginning, Warren, because you have a really interesting path into storyboard artistry.
9:12 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:12 Chris Winterbauer? Can you talk about the somewhat unusual route you took to storyboarding? And as you describe in your book, the unexpected actor who lent you an assist early on in finding your way into this part of the business?
9:28 Speaker 03 Okay, so I went to the School of Visual Arts. I had a job at Bloomingdale's part-time. After graduation, I thought, I'm just going to be an artist. And you know what? It's really hard getting freelance jobs. You don't just jump into it very often. So I was there for years and years. I was on the seventh floor. On the sixth floor, I had a friend who's a salesperson named Oscar Nunez, and his name still is Oscar Nunez. So Oscar told me about this group of people called the Black Filmmaker Foundation. The house party movie was formed by the Halden Brothers, who are filmmakers. So they created the Black Filmmaker Foundation, where people could get together.
10:12 Speaker 03 They had actors, writers, some behind the scenes, like camera people. And we'd meet up every third Saturday. So I got into the BFF. I was there for years and met a lot of great people, many of whom I'm still tight with. So Oscar got me into the BFF. The Haldens had an executive assistant named Rodney Stringfellow. Rodney had friends who were doing a low-budget movie called The Drop Squad, which was executive produced by Spike Lee. And then he recommended me for that movie, and I got the job. And that was my first job, which got me out of Bloomingdale's.
10:51 Chris Winterbauer? Wow. So Oscar Nunez, of course, was famous for The Office.
10:56 Speaker 03 Yes, so he was on The Office and State Farm commercials for years. A lot of movies, yeah. He's a great cat.
11:04 Chris Winterbauer? And so in your book, you describe how you, as a storyboard artist, you have to know So much film terminology, just for example.
11:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
11:14 Chris Winterbauer? To understand foreground, mid-ground, background. You have to understand shot size, shot selection. I remember in your book, you described how on the Drop Squad, you accidentally had the wrong aspect ratio for the storyboard. So it was television aspect ratio versus widescreen cinema. You know, you didn't go to film school. So was it really just a learning experience on set? As you kind of went through this process?
11:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, the School of Visual Arts, you could major in film there.
11:44 Chris Winterbauer? Oh, okay, got it.
11:45 Speaker 03 So there have been like known filmmakers that went to TSBA. I was majoring in doing comics. So that's where my focus was. But I did take three years of screenwriting.
12:00 Chris Winterbauer? Okay, got it.
12:01 Speaker 03 So I was somewhat in their film program for that. I took video class. I did direct some stuff, student projects there.
12:10 Chris Winterbauer? You also storyboarded on Antoine Fisher.
12:14 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:15 Chris Winterbauer? Denzel Washington's directorial debut. And I have long been wondering and fascinated by who drew the cricket in that movie.
12:24 Speaker 03 There you go.
12:24 Chris Winterbauer? The grasshopper. And because I'm always wondering like, who does that drawing? Because obviously, James Cameron did the nude drawing in Titanic. And then I wondered who did the grasshopper in that movie? And it was Warren Drummond. And you directed the scene.
12:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:38 Chris Winterbauer? At that moment as well for Denzel Washington.
12:41 Speaker 02 That is so cool.
12:42 Speaker 03 Mind blowing.
12:43 Chris Winterbauer? So, okay, can you walk us through that process with Denzel Washington? So you were obviously working directly with him. Versus in other instances, you worked directly with the cinematographer and talked about how you actually never worked directly with the director.
13:00 Speaker 03 That has happened too.
13:01 Chris Winterbauer? Can you describe the difference between those two processes? And maybe the advantages and disadvantages of either?
13:07 Speaker 03 Okay, well, first of all, there's directors and then there's Denzel.
13:12 Chris Winterbauer? For sure.
13:12 Speaker 03 So you can, you know, you can work with a director, but you're not always working with the director who will send you to Pelican Bay. You know, doing storyboards. Um, he's just incredible and he has so much power because he's Denzel. But when he's there, he's he was just they did a work. So it was his first feature film. I was his first storyboard artist and he was my first actor. Who later became World Sexist Man to direct a movie. Cause then I years later, I also did Channing Tatum's first directorial film, Dog. And I was Michael B's for the third Creed movie.
13:56 Speaker 02 Wow.
13:57 Chris Winterbauer? So you're just surrounding yourself with these extremely sexy men is what we're we're hearing.
14:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. So I need the sexy women, but my wife would kill me. So maybe. So so Denzel is really focused on simplicity. He's not a a shot director that wants to do. Low angles, wide angles, high shots, moving crane shots. He's all about what works for the scene. So I had to really be focused on just what was the storytelling he had to have. I'll often ask a director, what is the visual paradigm that they're following? And for Antoine Fisher, he was following Ordinary People, which was of course directed by another heartthrob turned director, Mr. Redford.
14:44 Speaker 03 But Key, Denzel, Eastwood, they all have a very similar style as far as it's about the actors, not the camera work. So with him is really, what can I do for you? You don't know exactly what you want in every shot. He had certain shots that he did know. For example, he wouldn't have a lot of the people offer their hands to Antoine. Cause the big thing about if you so the movie, he doesn't have a a warm family. He never grew up with a family. So a lot of the shots. Repeated motif was him being welcome to a family. So the hands being thrust to camera was a big thing that Denzel wanted put into the movie.
15:28 Speaker 03 Otherwise, the way that we work is I will come up with a really rough pass based on our conversations and then I'll give it to him and then he'll give me yes, no, yes, no, whatever works. So that's a director, but that's okay. So Ron Howard on A Beautiful Mind, I'm jumping ahead. Ron did not shot list for that movie. So I was there to help the other artists and we'd have a discussion. Rob would let us have a pass and then it would be the same thing. John Singleton always knew what he wanted. So John would shot list everything.
16:08 Speaker 03 He would do a handwritten shot list, give it to his assistant who would then type it out. And we would have a hundred shots or more per scene, like a big action sequence, like the opening for Too Fast Too Furious or the ending for this movie he did called Abduction, had hundreds of shots on the shot list. And you could have shot nine ninety-one A, ninety-one B. And the A could be the mainframe, the B could be the camera pushes in, the C could be camera pushes in, then it pans to the right and we follow someone, someone down the hallway.
16:50 Speaker 02 Wow.
16:51 Speaker 03 Hyper detailed, so it really depends on how they work. Cinematographers are very similar, except a cinematographer will often more than not know what they need. Because that's their job. They'll more often have a plan for what they're after. When I did analyze this, I didn't work with the director Harold Emes very often. So Stuart Driver was the DP and Stuart would sit down with me and he would go over shot by shot. And Stuart would also sketch things out because he's an artist as well. So he would give me these thumbnails and I would elaborate and add extra shots as I saw fit. Storytelling wise.
17:36 Speaker 03 When I work with a stunt coordinator, kind of the same thing. They'll, they'll know what they want. Pretty often, but they may give me more room for coming up with things. But it really can often depend from person to person for how they work.
17:54 Speaker 02 So, understanding that there's a big variety from director to director, can you talk to us about some of the higher stress timelines that you've been under? And beyond that, I'm curious about some numbers. For example, how many boards can you draw up in an hour?
18:08 Speaker 03 I had a deadline. I was on the Devil's Zone, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt. And there was one day that they needed something to shoot the next day. Went home and I sketched out this entire scene overnight. Went to the office at whatever, eight o'clock, whatever. Handed them in and went to sleep in the casting office. So that was a pretty tight deadline. When I worked on Die Hard with a Vengeance, I worked with Terry Leonard. And there's a car chase on the sawmill Parkway. I remember I got a call or the email. We need to have the storyboards for the Parkway.
18:53 Speaker 03 I'm like, what? And no, no one had told me this. And I found out they already started filming. So I whipped up like 70 frames overnight. And again, went to them very often. I was very tired. Hey, then I was there with Terry, the second unit director. And Terry, if you don't know, is also one of the all time great stuntmen. He was Indiana Jones that went under the truck and raiders of the Lost Ark.
19:24 Speaker 02 Wow.
19:25 Speaker 03 So that was Terry Leonard. I'll often have a lot of time, but as far as how many frames, if it's just sketchy, wow. In an hour, you can maybe get 15, 20 super loose thumbnails, but you'd have to sit the director down and say, this is what's going on because it will look insane. You would not tell, you don't want to do anything in an hour.
19:51 Chris Winterbauer? Right, yeah.
19:52 Speaker 03 Okay, that's by a large. Maybe eat, but anything else you don't want to do in an hour.
19:57 Chris Winterbauer? Right.
19:57 Speaker 03 So we usually get time, but every so often we have it where we gotta have this thing overnight because it's being shot in the morning because it's scheduled changed or for whatever reason. And then you just gotta get your sleep, grab some five hour intake, take care of it.
20:15 Chris Winterbauer? On like a big budget movie that you're on, and sometimes, you know, a department, there's multiple artists.
20:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:20 Chris Winterbauer? How many boards are you guys making on a movie? You know, we're talking thousands of shots in a movie.
20:26 Speaker 03 There were four of us on Tokyo Drift, so the end book was about a couple of inches of storyboards in a notebook, or like three inches of storyboards in a notebook that four of us did.
20:39 Chris Winterbauer? Wow.
20:40 Speaker 03 On Too Fast Too Furious, there was, I think, a total of five of us. It's like one of the few movies where I was the main person because John and I had that relationship. Uh, but there were like five of us.
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23:39 Chris Winterbauer? Okay, so you mentioned like you don't want to crank through a bunch in an hour. No. Right? Because you mentioned in the book, it's about the balance between detail and making sure that the audience's eye can seamlessly travel across all of the images and understand the story. Yes. Right? So, as an artist, can you share some tricks of the trade? Like, what makes a good storyboard to the layperson? Can you help walk us through that balance?
24:06 Speaker 03 One of the main things for if you're starting out, always keep the line of direction. If you have character A pointing to the right of the screen, character B pointing to the left, don't suddenly have character A pointing to the right and then B pointing to the right. Then it looks like if you cut from one shot to the other, person A became person B. So always remember what is the line of direction. You don't want to repeat the same kind of shot. Wide shot, wide shot, wide shot, wide shot, or just tight shots, unless it's the dialogue scene. Fine, but even with the dialogue scene, you want to break things up with the wide angle shot just to break it up.
24:50 Speaker 03 Same thing goes with an action scene. The other part is know how much time you have. Because if you get into this really needling detail and you, oh, look at me. I've just drawn the most immaculate painting ever. But you've got 90 frames to go and you ran out of time to add it in. You're screwed. You want to be able to work really loose to get everything done and then show the director or the DP or whomever it is that you're working with. You want to be able to work fast enough to show them the sketches first. And once they give you the notes, then you can go back and add detail. But if you have other scenes coming up, once again, don't be too precious with the work.
25:34 Speaker 03 Some people can do great detail in a short amount of time. Others cannot. Another mistake, making things flat. This is where you started off, but you were saying foreground, medium ground and background. Have different planes in your storyboards. If you look at Spielberg, for example, he's a master of it. Saving Private Ryan could have something going on really close, something in the middle. And then you find, oh, what's going on in the background?
26:07 Speaker 02 It's interesting to hear you talk about it because on one hand, this stuff seems very obvious, but to have to see it in your mind's eye and implement it with such consistency and make it really visually compelling seems like both such an art form and a technical skill that requires a wild amount of orientational and spatial kind of awareness.
26:26 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:27 Chris Winterbauer? So you started Analog, right? And then, and we talked about this with Dave Kamaitis, Steadicam operator, and this was the transition from film to digital. But I'm just curious, so you started analog and then you're moving on to digital pad-based drawing, the Cintiq monitor, I want to say.
26:45 Speaker 03 The Cintiq, yes.
26:46 Chris Winterbauer? Cintiq. And so can you talk to us about that transition? I'm assuming there's a lot of advantages to digital. Are there any things you miss about analog at all? I'm just curious what that's like.
26:57 Speaker 03 For the audience, what we mean by analog is paper and pencil, markers, colored pencils. So that's the old way of doing storyboards. I guess early on, I really missed the feeling of the tooth on paper and the feeling of a pencil going on a certain type of paper. You miss just freely sketching. It's a certain feeling just to draw on paper. So I kind of missed that.
27:28 Speaker 03 But, and here's the big but. If you made a mistake when you're drawing, you got to do it all over again. If you want to make a change, you may be able to go to a copy machine and enlarge or reduce something. If a director said, hey, you know what? This is really great, but can you move Sally by the foot to the left?
27:54 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, and then you gotta do.
27:55 Speaker 03 Hell, no. And there's no layers. There's no layers on paper. It's just the paper. You got to do everything over again. If you have everything printed out, you can't just go take frames 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and reorder them 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, or however that might. You can't, you have to do, you have to cut it out. If you want to get it to director and they're not in town, you'd have to scan it into your computer and then send it. Or in the dark times, I'm talking like you'd have to put your work through a fax machine. So with digital.
28:35 Speaker 03 You resist it at first, but then you go like, oh, I can loosen it up just by selecting and reducing the size of something. If I do things in layers, I can change the foreground, but not have to change all my background figures. I can actually repeat frames that only have a minute difference between them.
28:56 Speaker 02 Right.
28:57 Speaker 03 I could even make an animatic. Scanning, what's scanning? It's in my, I just save it in my computer and I send it to the director.
29:06 Speaker 02 That's amazing.
29:07 Chris Winterbauer? So Warren, there's a couple of movies on your IMDb that are not covered in your book that I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions about, one of which is The Bourne Identity.
29:17 Speaker 03 Oh.
29:18 Chris Winterbauer? From back in the day. And the reason I bring it up is like, that movie, and Warren's shaking in front of our audience who can't see. So Doug Liman is like a director who's had complicated productions. It's well known, you know, in a lot of his films, you know, Edge of Tomorrow, Chaos Walking, most recently. And The Bourne Identity was one of those. And that movie was, you know, everyone was saying, oh, Matt Damon is an action star. What is this? Blah, blah, blah. And of course, that movie spawned not just a franchise, but a whole new style of action filmmaking.
29:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
29:50 Chris Winterbauer? And the cinematography and the shot direction and selection was a big part of that. Can you tell us about your experience on that project?
29:58 Speaker 03 It's really funny because here's the thing. So I worked on that movie for about three weeks. I was in LA. I went back to New York to work with Doug. I had to go over to his place and work on the movie. So I was a big fan of the books, you know, the actual Jason Bourne books, right? The script was nothing like the book. So first of all, I'm like, why is it called The Bourne Identity? Because it's nothing like the book. And the final version of the film is nothing like the script that I saw.
30:36 Chris Winterbauer? Right.
30:36 Speaker 03 Because for people that don't know from the book, in the movie, he's a really young agent, or he's a hitman, basically. He's fresh off the boat. He's basically got amnesia the first time he goes out. I mean, he's really not that experienced. In the book, he's like a James Bond level guy. He's not a kid. He's like maybe forty years old. He does assignments. He does actual, I gotta go undercover. I gotta have this identity. I gotta check into this hotel.
31:13 Speaker 03 So that's just the fan part of it. So I did a bunch of scenes that I storyboarded. And by the way, the director was really easy to work with, but basically, nothing I did ended up in the movie, except for Jason Bourne floating in the water.
31:31 Chris Winterbauer? But that was a big one.
31:32 Speaker 03 That was it. That was it. Yeah, that was the, oh, the first shot.
31:36 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah.
31:36 Speaker 03 Like I said, Doug was easy to work with. He's very artsy, you know? You can see things seep into his head. He's got to process and work things out. He was fine. But I had a scene of Jason Bourne trapped in a hotel in the lobby, and these hitmen are coming out like a bunch of guys coming after him. And you gotta work your way around, just this whole scene, never used. I've been involved in martial arts since I was a teenager. I really look forward to doing this film. I wish it had been the movie that I saw on the screen.
32:09 Chris Winterbauer? Right.
32:10 Speaker 03 But that's show business.
32:13 Chris Winterbauer? Well, let me ask you then this. You come onto projects, you could be on them for the whole thing. You could be on for a couple of weeks.
32:17 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:18 Chris Winterbauer? In your book, you talk about sometimes you come on just for reshoots.
32:21 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:21 Chris Winterbauer? Sometimes, you know, you're brought in late in the process. Is there a sequence in a film that you?
32:29 Chris Winterbauer? Are most proud of, maybe because it's so close to what you boarded, or just the scale of it, maybe something we haven't spoken about?
32:37 Speaker 03 I think everything that John Singleton and I did together is close to what the storyboards are, because John, like I said, he shot listed everything, even though he would let me come up with things. There's a scene at the end of Abduction, which, you know, it wasn't really successful as a movie, but the scene was exactly how the storyboards came out. The opening scene from Too Fast Too Furious is super close to how the storyboards were for the movie. There's a scene in A Beautiful Mind that's in the book where John Nash is chased by the psychiatrist, thinking that he, that the psychiatrist is a Russian agent.
33:20 Speaker 03 There's a shot in there where John Nash is on this stairwell and he looks up and he sees these figures come at him. And I came up with the shot, like, wanted to have like a spooky low angle shot of coming in to what he thinks are bad guys. Ron did use that shot in the movie. And I said, that's my shot. Sometimes that happens. The lunar chase in Ad Astra.
33:45 Chris Winterbauer? That's an amazing scene, by the way.
33:47 Speaker 03 That was work, because the second unit director had never worked with a storyboard artist, and he was a really well-known second unit director. But we just didn't click. And it just, that happens sometimes. We just didn't quite connect. He would say, I want to have this, and I do exactly what I thought he said. That's not what I want to say. But there's no other way that that shot's going to work, the way you just described it. I mean, it finally worked out, but that was a lot of work. So I'm very proud of that scene. I didn't get any credit in the movie, which is if you want
34:26 Speaker 03 to really stick a knife in our heart, let us bust our ass for weeks or months on a movie and not give us credit.
34:35 Chris Winterbauer? I know. We just talked about it on Ghostbusters. To save money, they actually cut the names
34:40 Speaker 03 I heard that.
34:41 Chris Winterbauer? of 60 VFX artists, VFX artists, off the end of the movie, which is such bullshit.
34:47 Speaker 02 Such a burn.
34:48 Speaker 03 The level of bullshit, you can't get that high. I worked on the Ms. Marvel TV show during the dark COVID time and I had a lot of fun in that movie. Six months of work of myself and other artists. And there's a book now, The Art of the Ms. Marvel Series. No boards are in it. Conceptual work, costume, design. I didn't see any boards.
35:15 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, that's BS too. It's such an obvious thing to include because you could think of it as like the comic book version of the movie.
35:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:23 Chris Winterbauer? It's so cool.
35:24 Speaker 03 I, I got into storyboards because my mother and my sister got me the art of Star Wars. And I had lots of storyboards. Oh, wow. What are these? And this is before I wanted to be board artist. My thing was I wanted to be John Ramita, you know, one of my favorite comic book artists, a senior, by the way. And I segued into film, but help a brother out, you know, just give us a credit.
35:52 Chris Winterbauer? Just like, put, put the name on. It doesn't take up that much space.
35:55 Speaker 03 No, analyze this. I was there. So I analyzed this. I was trying to impress somebody and I watched the credits and it's like, fully artist. Okay, fully artist. Okay. Then if it has music by, I'm screwed. There's no, there's nothing.
36:10 Speaker 02 That's when you know.
36:11 Speaker 03 That's when you know.
36:12 Chris Winterbauer? I think that, Warren, that brings me to a kind of the question I wanted to end on, which is in the book, you make the important point that A, you guys look out for each other as storyboard artists.
36:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
36:20 Chris Winterbauer? You're helping each other find jobs, et cetera. But also that this business is a business of relationships and it is a business of referrals and, you know, you rely on your relationships, long-term relationships with people.
36:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
36:36 Chris Winterbauer? To get work.
36:38 Chris Winterbauer? Could you help, like, if our audience wants to get involved in film production, be it storyboarding or otherwise, I just think it's such an important point that you make in your book because it's something that I've certainly found to be true in the film business. Can you express the importance of finding and maintaining these relationships throughout your career?
36:55 Speaker 03 Well, if you do get a job on a production, whether it's a TV show, a movie, or a music video, or a commercial, the main thing is, first of all, don't be weird. Meaning, artists can be characters. So don't be the guy that, "He does great work, but he's kind of off. There are characters." Okay? So that's, that's one thing. Be personable. A lot of artists aren't chatty, per se. Be the person that you, that you can talk to. You just talk to the crew. Get to know the people that you work with. Because the people that you work
37:36 Speaker 03 with are the ones that are going to often recommend you for other jobs. I've been recommended for so many jobs for having and also maintaining relationships with people. And as far as the professional part, be on time. Help as much as possible. That's the main thing. Help as much as possible. Don't go beyond what you do. Don't, "Well, I think you should, no. Just stay in your lane." But if you could give some good advice in any, you know, do, do the best in your job as possible.
38:11 Chris Winterbauer? Amazing. All right, Warren, we have to plug your book because it's great. And we have it.
38:17 Speaker 03 Thank you.
38:17 Chris Winterbauer? We each got our own copy. It's called A Hard Day's Work: Storyboards and Stories of Fifteen Select Films and Television Shows by Warren Drummond. There's a foreword by Ron Howard, just in case his credits didn't blow you away enough. There's a lot of really great stuff we didn't touch on in the book, so we encourage people to buy it. Warren, is there anything else that we can plug on your behalf?
38:40 Speaker 03 I have to plug the creator of the book, which would be my beautiful wife, Betty K. Bynum, who in 2017 looked me in the eye and said, "You're going to do a book on your career." So Betty conceived of the book. She's the editor of the book. And also, Dream Title Book Publishing is hers because she's also the publisher.
39:05 Speaker 03 Of the book.
39:05 Chris Winterbauer? Amazing.
39:06 Speaker 03 She found the graphic designer. So everything, the look of how it's made, the quality of the paper, the type, the title is all due to her. So this book will be nothing without Betty's hard work. Let me say this. I've written screenplays. I don't write prose. Prose and scripts are not the same.
39:30 Chris Winterbauer? No.
39:31 Speaker 03 And she had to whip my behind and drive herself crazy because I would just have this different way of constructing sentences, but there you go. So.
39:42 Chris Winterbauer? I can say she is extremely patient because my uncle, who was an artist in the eighties, he did like B movie, movie posters and video game posters. He wrote a book about his experience and he had his wife edit it and she got so fed up with him that I think she quit the job. So kudos to your wife for finishing your book with you because it can be hard working with artists, you know, to get things done.
40:05 Speaker 03 And when you're married to them as well.
40:07 Chris Winterbauer? Yeah, yeah. It's a whole different ballgame.
40:10 Speaker 03 Good luck, guys.
40:11 Chris Winterbauer? All right, everybody. Check out A Hard Day's Work. You can get it on Amazon.
40:15 Speaker 03 If you get it on Amazon, that's fine. But Betty's site for Dream Tunnel Books is dreamiam.com. Dream, letter I, letters A M, dreamiam.com. And I will autograph the books for you and I can write something in the book for you as well. So if you wanted autographs by me, I will, I will do that by dreamiam.com and I will mail it out myself. Coaches is free. So there you go.
40:46 Chris Winterbauer? Very good. All right. Thank you so much, Warren. And Warren also is a veritable movie buff, film history.
40:55 Chris Winterbauer? Just treasure trove of facts. And so we get on occasion, some nice corrections from Warren on the pod. So if you hear a correction, if you, no, well, don't make it sound like we make that many mistakes. But we really appreciate it. And you, and you reached out after we did Boys in the Hood, I believe. And it was, it's just really, it's great to talk to you. It's an honor to talk to someone who worked so closely with so many of the directors we admire and, and crew members and craftspeople, and obviously your work as well on this show. And
41:24 Speaker 03 Fun. By the way, you're, the three of you are so much fun to listen to. Your accent when you did The Lord of the Rings and someone's doing their Peter Jackson impression. Thank you very much.
41:36 Chris Winterbauer? That's me.
41:37 Speaker 03 You guys are pretty funny.
41:38 Chris Winterbauer? For better or worse. Well, we appreciate it.
41:40 Speaker 03 There you go. So thank you. Thank you all.
41:42 Speaker 02 Thanks, Warren.
41:43 Chris Winterbauer? Thank you.
41:45 Speaker 02 Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman.
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Previous Die Hard Next Eyes Wide Shut Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated