I work as a Story Artist on WALL-E and I work with a small team of story artists helping our director, Andrew Stanton, facilitate and create the vision of the movie. We essentially draw the movie, redraw the movie, redraw it and redraw it, over and over again for many, many years.

In the old days we used to present storyboards pinned to a board, but more recently we've started doing them frame-by-frame on the computer as part of something called a story reel. There's a mental button that gets pushed when you see a tonne of drawings pinned to a board. You tend to get ahead of yourself. So it's really nice to have control, now, in the presentation, so that we can step through and feed the images to the director one by one.

The goal of the story reel is really to work out the problems and the kinks in advance of the rest of the departments at the studio jumping in and doing their part. It's a fairly economical and focused way for a small team to iron out the story problems so we don't discover, halfway through animation, that things don't work.

Most of the work done on the story reels on the computer is made up of storyboards in sequence. A good deal of After Effects work is done on top of that. Certain camera moves, compositing the Hello Dolly stuff, explosions, lighting effects - that work would go to our After Effects guys who were facilitating those moments.

There wasn't much in the way of actual CG pre-visualisation or animatic type of stuff. As certain sequences come closer to being on target, they'll move down the line and become the domain of the Layout or Animation teams and those essentially become the animatics - but it's much more specific hard data that'll actually end up in the final shot. Our goal is to map it out so that when it gets to that stage it's less about reinventing the wheel and more about bringing it in cinematically.

For WALL-E, there's a lot more information packed into the boards than there normally would be. Every pose, every position, every beat of the acting has to get drawn out, because when this is all cut together into our story reel, you've got to be able to sit as an audience member, with a clear objective and a blank slate, and understand what's going on.