Story Boarding woes?

Showster

Hiya guys, just wanted to find out your opinions on the use of story boarding especially if you use motion capture / work with cut scenes.

We've been running a motion capture module for a couple of years (staffs university) and I want to get the students to do some decent planning.

Any particular advise you guys have on preping boards?, deadlines, composition, working between actual takes and boards etc...

Neo_God

You'd want storyboards even with motion captured animations, because the storyboards also set up how they will be shot.

I've found it best to work on index cards for story boards, I know people who like working on one big sheet with several boxes in it because it's less stuff to keep around. But doing it on individual cards makes it easier for you to re arrange scenes and what not. And usually they best way to make them is to translate your script into a shot list, then work off the shot list to make the story boards.

With composition. I think it really ranges, because some people do 2 second thumbnails for storyboard, while others do fairly detailed drawing with shading. I did a storybaord for a part of an animtion for my scriptwriting class back in march. Here are 4 panels out of the 105 I did.



Little bit of Zolly shot action going on.



They were all hand drawn, then inked, then shaded with markers.

My deadlines for the project were a little steep, it was pretty much a week for storyboards.

I'm sorry, but I can't tell you anything about working with storyboards between actual takes, as I have yet to turn my storyboards into an animation.

fogmann

I had an entire class devoted solely to preproduction (it was called Media Presentation), and we did a lot of storyboarding and script writing. Some storyboards were due in a week, for some we had whole month (final project). Later on, when we were actually making animated shorts, the storyboards came in mainly as quick sketches to help us plan, because we didn't have much time to spend on polishing the presentation. If there is a tight schedule, one thing that you might want to cinsider is building the storyboards in such a way that they can be easily transferred into an animatic, because animatics are always nice to have, and perhaps you could even use motion capture animation for them. For instance, if you don't have models ready, you could have cutout characters composited in the rough version of the environment in 3D. That way, you can have students plan out the shot more accurately, avoiding spending too much time on getting perspective right in storyboard, and also use this setup to create animatic for the shot, with all the camera movement and for mis-en-scene in general. I have done planning this way once for my animation project, although we used dummy 3D models instead of cutouts, and I thought it worked pretty well in helping us figure out how to set up the scene for the take, and we were also able to do quick animatic with that setup, figuring out timing, camera movement and angles.

Here are some of my storyboards: http://fogmann.com/static/storyboards/ Usually, you would want to have clearly indicated camera and character movement, as well as framing.

Ninjas

In my experience, it doesn't matter what you are doing, storyboarding is a really great idea. Storyboarding live action scenes, for example lets you see early what shots you may want to pick up, but it certainly doesn't mean you have to follow them exactly.

I think very quick thumbnail storyboards are all that is really required to get a feel for how something is going to work.

ebagg

In my college storyboarding class, we not only did detailed storyboards, we did "animatics" as the teacher called them, where we would take the panels of our storyboards and edit them together with sound and occasional pans or zooms to get the pacing down as well. Pixar always shows off the animatics they do for their movie scenes, the more time spent during pre-production the less time you dawdle during production with improvised parts, or as the saying goes 'Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance!'

We had a great book specifically on storyboarding for the class, I'll post up the title and author when I have a chance to sift through my shelves.

Neo_God

Animatics weren't needed, but I did one just for the extra credit. However mine didn't have any sound, but then again my animation didn't even call for dialog.

SkullboX

Coincidentally, I am creating one for an assignment as well at the moment. The amount of detail in your storyboard really depends on the medium you're going to use it for later, the preproduction stage you're in and most importantly, the time you have to create it.

For the assignment I'm curently working on we were encouraged to use simplified characters, just making sure we had every shot, the story is told entirely.

Neo_God's storyboard looks really great, but it's a shit load of work, and not always necessary - especially in early pre production. When your working storyboard (as opposed to a presentation storyboard) don't worry too much about awesome looking pictures and consistant rendering of characters. Especially when you're working in 3D with motion capture, your characters will always be consitent anyway, and the animations will never match the exact poses you put on paper, besides you have a camera to move and will need to. Make sure it's clear when a shot changes, make sure the characters can be identified and every shot an important pose/change is there so the story is clear to the actor acting out the animations.

One thing though, always create storyboards on individual sheets. You often see them created on a single sheet of paper but that has two huge disadvantages. First off, with seperate images you can check cutting inbetween shots by flipping, which is one of the most important aspects of storyboarding to begin with. Also, if you need to add another shot, which is going to be often, you can simply add another sheet of paper inbetween. When they're all on a single page, you're not likely to redraw 6 shots if image number 3 on your 8-frame piece of paper turns out to need more explanation.

Do a search on 'storyboard' on google, you'll get some idea of how much detail can be put in and how less you need to get a story across.

For a longer animation project with more time to do it, I'd certainly spend more time making good looking storyboards. But especially for motion capture, I definitely wouldn't bother as much as neo_god's example - no matter how good it looks.

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We had a great book specifically on storyboarding for the class, I'll post up the title and author when I have a chance to sift through my shelves.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please do! I'm looking for some good material on this subject.

Neo_God

I've found this book to be very good:
http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Storyboa...TF8&s=books

The storyboards I made were detailed, but then again, part of the project was also to pitch the idea of the series to a potential producer. So these storyboards are more of a presentation storyboard.

Showster

nice info guys! cheers