Drawing on his comic book cred

Rob McCallum holds the rare distinction of having once drawn 300 storyboards -- the comic-book-like panels that summarize a film's shots for the crew -- in 72 hours. "And then a couple of days later they go, 'Hey, we've changed things. You think you could it again?' " says McCallum with a laugh. While most jobs aren't quite so Proustian in their page count, McCallum spends the majority of most of his days drawing. He works off scripts, shot lists and brainstorming sessions with directors and key crew.

Born in the Scottish town of Greenock, McCallum grew up on a steady diet of "Star Wars" and Ray Harryhausen movies before heading to the Glasgow School of Art. He dabbled in directing short films before landing a job drawing comics for the likes of Marvel, DC and Dark Horse. In the late 1990s, a day after learning that the project he'd been working on -- Stan Lee's "Excelsior Line" -- had been put on indefinite hold due to Marvel's business woes, he got a call to do storyboards on a Hallmark film in Scotland and hasn't looked back since.

Recently, the Toronto-based McCallum put pencil to paper for Doug Liman's teleportation thriller "Jumper," due for release Thursday, and the high-school dramedy "Charlie Bartlett," which hits theaters Feb. 22.

Comic relief: Since storyboards are a communication tool for directors to convey their vision to the crew, McCallum strives to make his as interesting as possible. "I try to make my storyboards a good read when I'm drawing," says the artist, who has worked on films including "Land of the Dead," "Hairspray" and "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium." "I think it may be from when I drew comics. There's a pacing in comics, and you're always aware of the person turning the page. You know, a really big moment in the comic, you'll turn the page and it'll be a big double-page splash panel for full impact. And I still try and do that sometimes. I will give expressions to people's faces. I will put in a wee bit of extra detail here and there just to sell the sequence. I try and make it so that you get a sense of the speed and the mood and the emotion of each sequence from my boards."