Storyboards

Like a lot of animators, I use storyboards to help me plan the action that's about to take place. I find this step to be a bit tedious, but necessary. Depending on how detailed I make the panels, they can take me a while to finish. Fortunately, I'm drawing everything directly in the computer, so it allows me the freedom to quickly reuse elements that I've drawn before and then alter them slightly to get some variation. The other great thing about drawing directly in the computer is that I can re-purpose these drawings when I make the animatic or moving storyboards. I do this so I can get a sense of how long the animation is going to be. I'm drawing everything in Photoshop on multiple layers and when I'm ready to move them, I will bring them into After Effects. This requires a little bit of planning beforehand because I need to know what I am going to move. You’ll see what I’m talking about when I post the animatic.

What I’m showing here is actually the second version of the storyboard. The first version I had some friends look at and give me some feedback to make sure that everything made sense and was flowing correctly. Based on that feedback, I made a couple of changes that should help make the story clearer.

I always tend to be a little defensive when it comes to my personal work. When I received the feedback, I rejected it right away. I was thinking, ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about!’ But after thinking about it for a while I realized that the comments were valid, so I made the changes. I’m difficult, but I’m not so difficult that I won’t take good advice when it’s given.

 

Making the panels for the storyboard was easy enough. I placed all of the layers for the panels inside of layer groups but with about 47 layer groups, I did not want to spend all that time selecting a layer, un-hiding it and then saving it and then re-hiding it and then going to the next. Doing that 47 times gets old real fast. 

So I made an action script in Photoshop that automated a lot of the process. I still had to manually name the files to be saved out, but it really helped to cut down on the clicking. 

Once that was done, I made a template in Illustrator of the storyboard page and then I imported the images, four at a time, onto each page. They came in full size so they had to be scaled down and then repositioned. Again I didn’t want to do everything manually, 

so I wrote another action script in Illustrator to resize and move all of the panels to the correct horizontal position. I was going to have the script do the same for the vertical position, as well, but there was no way for me to tell illustrator which image I wanted to be positioned first, so I did the vertical positioning by hand.

Overall, the boards were pretty easy to make.

More to come.