Some useful notes on storyboarding, pitching, and taking the indie development route (from a chat with story artist/show creator)

Wanted to share some solid career and workflow insights from a recent chat I had with storyboard artist Miranda Li (a Sheridan animation grad). She and her best friend Joy Zhou won the Pitch This! contest at OIAF last year with their indie project On The Haunt, and she had some really practical stuff to say about the industry right now:

• Pitching isn't a classroom presentation: When they first pitched, they memorized a whole script and basically read off it. The second time around, they treated it like an actual performance—keeping it visual, making jokes, and cutting out the massive lore dumps. People tune out when you spend 5 minutes explaining character backstories.
• The reality of going indie: Studio greenlights are tough to get right now, so building your own project is becoming much more common. The upside is getting 100% creative control without having to water down your themes. The downside is having to figure out the whole pipeline—writing, boarding, producing—while still working a full-time day job.
• Storyboarding hacks: Miranda talked about avoiding "default" expressions and focusing on weird, specific acting quirks to make boards feel real. To save time and pencil mileage, she keeps a mirror at her desk or turns on her webcam to film quick pose references instead of trying to draw everything straight from her head.
• Finding a good co-creator: Working with someone who has different strengths makes a huge difference—like one person being better at drama and the other at comedy. When you hit a wall, you can just defer to whoever's stronger in that specific area.

If you want to check out the full conversation on storyboarding and handling an indie pilot, you can listen here: https://youtu.be/AjxmudZe6oc