Whiteboard
Albert Stallion invented whiteboards while working at Alliance in the 1960s. Alliance (now known as PolyVision) produced enameled steel for architectural cladding, but Stallion noted it could also potentially be used as a writing surface. Stallion later left Alliance to form his own whiteboard production company, MagiBoards.
Storyboard
Many large budget silent films were storyboarded, but most of this material has been lost during the reduction of the studio archives during the 1970s and 1980s. Special effects pioneer Georges Méliès is known to have been among the first filmmakers to use storyboards and pre-production art to visualize planned effects. However, storyboarding in the form widely known today was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s. In the biography of her father, "The Story of Walt Disney" (Henry Holt, 1956), Diane Disney Miller explains that the first complete storyboards were created for the 1933 Disney short "Three Little Pigs". According to John Canemaker, in "Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards" (1999, Hyperion Press), the first storyboards at Disney evolved from comic-book like "story sketches" created in the 1920s to illustrate concepts for animated cartoon short subjects such as Plane Crazy and "Steamboat Willie", and within a few years the idea spread to other studios.