Harold Michelson

From Variety Magazine Film Review: 'Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story': "...the history of storyboard artists' contribution to the movies can be measured, in a sense, by how quasi-underground and off the books they remain. (There is still no Academy Award for storyboarding.) "Harold and Lillian" offers other enticing examples of what Michelson brought to the movies he worked on. He devised much of the visionary doomsday look and aura of Hitchcock's "The Birds," and, startlingly, he designed all the most famous images from "The Graduate": the composition that framed Ben with Mrs. Robinson's stockinged leg, Ben in his scuba mask being pushed back into the swimming pool, and, at the end, the panoramic shot of him holding his arms up like Christ as he bangs against the church window. Those shots went a long way toward defining the movie's artistry, and its extraordinary influence. Yet for Harold Michelson, sitting at his drafting table looking like Norman Rockwell with his pipe, it was all in a day's work. http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/harold-and-lillian-review-1202424762/.

Michelson was one of the professional Hollywood film cadre teaching at the Chouinard Art School's film program during the early 1960s. Jack Senter taught film and stage set design/drafting. Mentor Huebner taught life drawing. Tad Haworth taught story board/continuity sketching. Harold's class specialized in continuity script story board presentation, and a serious perspective projection layout system for set illustration. This projection system was plotted from a 1/4" set designer's schematic floor plan, pin pointing the camera's floor spotting position, projecting the perspective positions of the floor plan on a horizon line, factoring in the set's elevation wall corners, camera's lens height, to the illustration's horizon line, and then accurately depicting ceiling heights and the scale depth of field within the lens ratio. Conferencing with a director and the director of photography, the plan and plotting for camera determined how much of the set was required to be built, based upon the director's plan for the actor's scene motivation. Harold Michelson's Chouinard Art School's film illustration class was extremely popular, often attended by NYC illustrators making a move to the West Coast, intending on cashing in on studio illustration jobs. Prior to the 1990's computer programs, this perspective projection illustration system was the most accurate drawing tool of the production designer and art director. Presentation set design sketches were the producer's portfolio in raising financing for their film's expenses.

Some of his strikingly illustrative storyboards showing Moses parting the Red Sea for the half-century-old production of The Ten Commandments (1956) were featured in a two-page spread in the Summer 2013 issue of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Quarterly.