Leader Spotlight: Lee Onysko of Storyboarding Club
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I’m Lee Onysko! I’m a nonbinary storyboard artist with a focus on children’s media, though I also love working on action sequences. I’m heading into my senior year here at SCAD and I’m really looking forward to the rest of my classes, especially the ones surrounding senior thesis films.
What is the purpose of Storyboarding Club? Do you have a specific vision as the club’s leader for what that should be?
The main purpose of the SCAD Storyboarding Club is to be a place where students interested in storyboarding can learn and connect outside of a class setting. For freshman it’s a great way to get involved with storyboarding before you have the chance to take any of your storyboarding classes, and for seniors it’s a great place to build connections with other students, and hopefully with industry professionals in the future. Structure wise, we don’t want the club to be another lecture. Involving the club members as much as possible is our goal, and while there is an educational aspect to the club, we prefer to only talk for a little while and then let people take a hands on approach to using the techniques we go over through group activities and storyboarding games. In the future we would love to invite a lot of guest speakers to talk during club meetings. If enough people come to the club, we could even get enough of a budget to pay current industry professionals to call in for Skype meetings! Overall though, our main goal is to allow students to connect with other artists and improve their storyboarding skills through hands on practice.
What are your responsibilities as club president?
As the club president I handle a variety of tasks. I communicate with the ICC to make sure everything is in order, hang up posters, come up with meeting ideas, make presentations, and run club meetings with the other club officers. A lot of this is collaborative though! The other officers also take on many of these tasks so that we can each aid in creating the club that we want the SBC to be. We take turns creating posters, advertising the club, and we all contribute to the creation of the clubs presentations.
What type of events/meetings does the club host? What kind of benefits or opportunities can your club provide?
Right now our meetings are structured so that we talk about things like storyboarding basics, programs to use, etc. at the beginning of the meeting, then go into an activity so people can apply what they have just learned. Benefits wise, the SBC is a place where students can learn and improve their storyboarding skills to prepare for entering the art workforce. Something that we are looking forward to implementing are group outings to the life drawing sessions that SCAD hosts. In the future we will have meetings with SCAD professors and other professionals where students can ask questions and build industry connections.
Why did you get involved with this club? Is there anything you wish you had known going in?
During my freshman year at SCAD I attended the storyboarding club and loved having a place to learn about boarding with other SCAD students. Eventually the club stopped holding meetings though, and after I took some of SCAD’s storyboarding classes and heard that people were interested in the club I decided I wanted to start it up again. It took a while to get the gears rolling, but so far it’s been a great experience! Going in the only thing I would say I wish I knew more about was collaborating with the ICC. They’ve been very patient with me though and even if it was a bit confusing, they really helped me work through what we needed to do to get the club running.
One of our values at Render Q is encouraging collaboration between students in various majors and disciplines. What sort of opportunities does SBC offer towards this?
This is something that the SBC also values! Storyboarding isn’t just used in animation. As such, we’d really love to get other majors involved in it! We want to connect storyboard artists with people who need board artists on their projects. Film majors and game design majors are people who we would love to get involved with the club. Other majors are welcome to come attend the club to pitch their ideas to the club members, and hopefully we’ll be able to connect them with people interested in boarding their projects!
Image courtesy of SCAD Storyboarding Club. Follow them on social media at @scadsbc!
