meeting with Laurent Jennet, cartoon storyboarder

The little Prince, Arthur and the Invisibles or the new Inspector Gadget : behind these successful animated series hides the cartoonist Laurent Jennet. It was he who created the first traits of the characters by making the storyboard. “I’m just past the text stage. It’s an alignment of words that makes sense, and I do an alignment of images that must have cinematic meaning“, explains Laurent Jennet.

On his graphics tablet, the characters and their adventures take shape for the first time. He is currently working on an upcoming series of fifty episodes for television. “What matters is having the right expressions, at the right time, and that everything that should give substance to the cartoon later is already present in the storyboard“.

Born with cinema

It’s a job that’s relatively unknown and little practiced here, even though France is the third-largest producer of animated films behind the United States and Japan. A profession born with the invention of cinema. “It is a profession for which there are many demands and where you have to go the distance. It takes a lot of drawings and a lot of concentration, and it’s not always easy“, continues Laurent Jennet.

And of course, you also have to resist the stress, the pressure, because the rest of the project depends on your work, on which about fifty other contributors will intervene in charge of sound design, colorization, animation or even dialogues.