Posted on October 15, 2026

Spider-Man: Maximum Venom part 4, 2020

All rise! In this episode you get what everyone wants from a TV cartoon: courtroom drama!

Seriously, a big chunk of this one happens in a courtroom. That’s a single environment with a limited number of characters, most of them seated, talking to each other. Exactly what you look for in a cartoon, right? So you may be wondering, how does one make a courtroom drama watchable in a cartoon?

The first thing you need, of course, is characters you care about. That’s a foundation you have to build over the course of a series. If nobody cares about the characters, nobody will care what happens to them. But that’s outside the scope of this essay, so we’ll move on.

The second thing you need is a good script with well-paced dialogue that doesn’t get bogged down in procedure. We only have 22 minutes, after all, and there are other things to do in this episode. This is the responsibility of the writer. The filmmaking begins once we have the finished script.

I say “filmmaking” because that’s exactly what we do in a storyboard. We use the same toolbox everyone in live-action uses. We decide what the camera needs to see, how the characters perform, whether a shot should be wide, medium, or close, where the lights are, when to amp up the drama, and on and on. Really, it’s no different from a busy action scene. You just have a more limited space to play in and you need to make the most of it.

If an artist can’t get interested in their subject, you end up with a very bland storyboard. If they think, “this scene boring, so I can’t make it interesting,” maybe they’re not cut out for the job. Everything will be boring if you approach it that way. And the opposite is also true: everything can be made interesting if you’re imaginative enough to find some interest in it.

Courtroom drama can be highly engaging in a live-action setting, even if most of the actors aren’t moving. The director and camera operator make up for that by anticipating what the viewers want to see, and then by turns granting that wish or subverting it for effect. It’s another version of what I wrote about over here: setting a baseline and then finding ways to spike it.

The major difference between live-action and animation, though, is that when you build a live-action set you can shoot anywhere you want in it. In animation, you have to pay a separate fee for every background because they all have to be individually drawn and painted. This is what drives us to reuse backgrounds whenever we can. If it’s already been paid for, it costs nothing to use it again. As you watch the courtroom scenes in this episode, you’ll see the same angles and backgrounds many times.

With that as a given limitation, it’s all on you as the storyboard artist to make sure it doesn’t feel repetitive. So that’s where you drill down on what a courtroom drama is all about; people conveying information and other people reacting to it. That allows you to cut back and forth a lot, but this too can get repetitive if you don’t find ways to spike it.

My approach to this springs from my cardinal rule about all animation filmmaking: let the dialogue do the talking. By that I mean, examine what’s being said and focus on who’s saying it, but also be conscious of who’s listening and who is affected. The content of a line will tell you if it’s broad or intimate. Broad lines call for big scenes with several people listening. Intimate lines tell you to move the camera in for close-ups. If someone in particular has a specific reaction to what’s being said, that’s your cue to put them on screen while they’re listening.

I could cite more examples, but the key word is MOTIVATION. Your camera represents your audience. They’re an invisible character observing the scene you’re creating. Whatever they’re motivated to look it is what your camera should look at. That’s the baseline. When you want to surprise them with something unexpected, that’s the spike.

Dialogue is another form of motivation. If you let the dialogue motivate your choice of angles and subjects, you’ll almost always get it right. And your scene will be anything but boring. Court dismissed.