I made a side-by-side comparison chart for my film. The images on the left are panels from my preliminary storyboard from last July, and the images on the right are from the finished film, 10 months later.
These few examples are special because they pretty much stayed the same from my first pass (albeit a few minor changes here and there). Not every shot in the film was copied verbatim from the storyboard. Some of my original ideas for how shots were going to be laid out were either too flat and uninteresting (like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon) or so complicated that it would've been a real pain to animate once I got up to layout and animation later on.
That's why it's always good to get a second opinion on things. That's why I had my thesis advisor (and good friend) Howard Beckerman help me out on every step of the process. To me, Howard was my "test audience" to see whether things were working or not. If he didn't understand what was going on, that's when I knew that I needed to make some changes so he would understand it.
Whenever I had an issue, I went to Howard for advice on how to fix it, and every time we would straighten things out so they worked. Sometimes it would be a minor tweak in the camera angle or a pose, and other times whole story ideas were thrown out the window. It's hard to let some things go, but for the sake of clarity it's important to fix things so the audience won't be left scratching their heads and asking questions.
