A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema

The exhibition, curated by Melissa Harris, examines the creative process before the making of a film, exploring storyboards and other materials such as moodboards, drawings, sketches, scrapbooks, notebooks, annotated screenplays, and photographs.

Set up in the spaces of Osservatorio, the project includes over 800 items created between the late 1920s and 2024 by more than 50 authors, including directors, cinematographers, artists, graphic designers, animators, choreographers, and other figures involved in the production of films and videos.

The origins of the storyboard date back to the early 20th century and are linked to the development of animation. From the 1930s, Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney Productions, followed in the 1940s by United Productions of America, commissioned artists to create sequences of sketches and other visual elements during the plot development and character definition phases. In these same years, the storyboard became a fundamental tool for the creation of cinematic works, from animation to live-action, offering a concrete and systematic visual representation of the unfolding story. Decades later, the storyboard remains a precursor for animation projects, as evidenced by the preparatory drawings of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli featured in the exhibition.