a couple snippets from a presentation i gave at school this past week on storyboarding!!
‼️DISCLAIMER: I am still a student and have only worked on student and indie projects! This is just stuff that I personally find helpful as an amateur, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt!
Happy boarding, friends! ✍️💕
These are such great tips! My storyboarder friend and I were just talking about this the other day, so I'd like to add a bonus tip to that last one, from the perspective of someone who works later in the pipeline:
If you're going to raise or lower the camera, try to save high angles (looking down at the characters) for when there's less leg movement or a shorter shot, and use low angles (looking up at the characters) when there's a lot of leg movement so you can make use of foreground elements.
You can do this in a way that adds a cinematic feel and scale to your boards, while also saving your animators some legwork (literally). A show that absolutely nails this is Legend of Vox Machina. They drop the camera a lot or add raised elements in the foreground when lots of characters are running toward camera, or doing difficult fight choreo, etc. Here are some examples of low cameras + raised foregrounds:
This one is actually a very slightly high camera, but the foreground is used in a really clever way so none of that pesky walking-on-uneven-ground needs to be animated:
The entirety of s2ep9 is a masterclass in this; there are so many running crowd shots but it's boarded really brilliantly and keeps things feeling really impactful, but they're not wasting animator time on a bunch of weird-angle feet:
None of these feel like a "cheat"; they all really add to the depth and even the mood of the shots! But they also make things a bit easier for animation. Absolutely applause worthy stuff.
