Vignette is a term that comes from the French vignette and that allows us to name the boxes of a series that, with their drawings and texts, make up a comic. The concept also refers to the printed scene in a publication that can be accompanied by a comment and is usually humorous.
The vignette, therefore, is the painting that represents an instant or moment of a comic strip. It is generally regarded as the least significant pictographic representation of time or space. Therefore, it is the minimum unit of the drawing or comic montage. Vignettes can present verbal language and iconic language simultaneously, since some only show drawings and others also include text. The reading order corresponds to the writing system: in Western countries, therefore, the panels are read from left to right, in the same direction in which the pages are turned. This format changes in countries that write and read from right to left, such as Japan.
The vignettes are delimited by black lines and separated by a space known as a street or gutter. The reader must interpret the dead times between the different vignettes and make sense of them. Currently, digital comics (which can be read on the internet or on a device such as a computer or tablet) put the notion of vignette into play, since the transfer between scene and scene can be done in different ways: with animations, requiring for the reader to click or tap on a certain point on the screen, and so on. Storyboard Another field of use of cartoons is the cinema, specifically in the preparation of a storyboard, that is, a series of drawings that are shown in sequence and that serve as a guide to understand a story, to get an idea of how it is will develop, it will look like a certain animation of a character or to build the skeleton of a movie before making it. The origins of the storyboard (the application of which is known as storyboarding) can be traced back to the 1930s at Disney Studios. Until then, both the father of cartoons and other studios used similar processes. The popularity of this technique, as simple in appearance as it is useful for creators of animated content, was considerable during the 1940s. Thanks to the use of the storyboard, it is possible to visualize the development of the events of a story as the cameras will see it . them, simply investing time and paper to make the drawings. Needless to say, this process is very inexpensive, with no major expense for filmmakers, so there aren’t many valid reasons to ignore it.
At the bottom of each frame it is possible to make notes related to specific technical issues of the filming, or to the director’s goals that are too detailed to be expressed in the vignettes. The degree of complexity of a storyboard varies depending on the needs and the field in which it is used. Advertisers often use this technique to unleash their creativity, but they don’t require as deep a level of detail as filmmakers do, as they generally aren’t looking to trigger as wide a range of emotions and sensations in consumers. In addition, it influences the number of people who will consult it at the time of its completion. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the use of color, as well as the finish of the images, depends on the taste of each one: a black and white storyboard, composed of geometric sketches, is equally valid as a sequence of realistic colored paintings.
