What You Can Learn About Storyboarding from Temple of the Seven Golden Camels

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels (sevencamels.blogspot.com) is a long-running blog about the art of storyboarding, written from the perspective of a working professional in film and animation. Its stated scope is broad: "Everything I know about the art of storyboarding." If you want to understand how storyboards are actually built—not just what they look like—the blog is most useful as a source of practical craft principles and hard-won working habits rather than a structured course. It suits beginners who want a mental model of the job and intermediate artists looking to sharpen staging, clarity, and storytelling choices.

What the blog covers

Based on its own description, the site is organized around the author's accumulated knowledge of storyboarding as a discipline. In practice, that means content in these areas:

• Fundamentals of storyboarding for film and animation — how sequences are planned, how shots connect, and why boards exist as a communication tool for the whole production.
• Practical tips and techniques from experience — working methods, common mistakes, and shortcuts that come from doing the job rather than from theory.
• Visual storytelling principles and composition — staging, camera placement, readability, and how to direct the viewer's eye across a panel.
• Skill development through practice — how to build the habit of boarding, what to study, and how to improve deliberately.

How to use it as a learning path

Because the material is a blog rather than a curriculum, the most effective approach is to treat it as a reference library and read by theme.

1. Start with the fundamentals. Read posts about what a storyboard is for and how it functions in a pipeline before diving into style.
2. Move to technique. Focus on posts about staging, composition, and clarity—these are the skills that separate readable boards from confusing ones.
3. Apply to your own work. Take a scene you have boarded and re-examine it against the principles you just read, then redraw the weakest panels.
4. Repeat with new scenes. Improvement in boarding comes from volume plus review, not from reading alone.

The expected result of this loop is not a finished style but a sharper eye: you start noticing when a shot is unclear or a sequence loses momentum before someone else points it out.

What to expect and what to watch for

A few practical cautions. Blog archives can be uneven—some posts assume prior context, and older entries may reflect tools or studio practices that have since changed. Read dates where available and cross-check specific technical claims against current production standards. Also note that the site is a personal publication, so treat its advice as one experienced practitioner's perspective rather than an industry-wide rule.

A concrete way to practice

If you want to turn reading into skill, try this task after any post on staging or composition:

• Pick a short scene from a film you know well.
• Board it yourself in 10–15 panels without looking at the original.
• Compare your version to the actual sequence and note where yours is less clear or less dramatic.
• Identify which principle from the blog would have fixed the weakest panel, then redraw it.

That comparison step is where most of the learning happens, because it forces you to see the gap between intention and result.

Bottom line

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels is worth following if you want craft-level, experience-based insight into storyboarding for film and animation. Use it as a themed reference you read actively and test against your own boards, not as a linear course. Expect principles and working methods rather than software walkthroughs, and verify any tool-specific or studio-specific detail against current sources.