Hi Eddie! How are things?
Just wondering if you have any tips on creating storyboards and how to make easier to read?
Okay, so I actually live for questions like this and could spend days elaborating. I'll try and keep it brief and relevant...
First of all I start with loose thumbnails. I actually find that the first loose, badly scribbled drawings of the characters turn out to be the inspiration poses I use in the final board. I have a sketchbook of scribbled thumbnails that you can actually see the whole of 'Los Campeones de La Lucha Libre' play out.
When it comes to storyboarding, I've tried software such as Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, which gives you all kinds of formats, brushes, and lets you take your panels through to animatic by adding audio dialogue, but I find it too stiff and prefer something a little more basic and casual. So I create my own templates...
First of all I work to one universal size spec: 1920x1080 pixels which is HD standard.
As this is such a large size, I reduce the frame - keeping the same ratio - and past it into a series of panels for my own storyboard template.
*This way any panels you draw can be enlarged back to 1920x1080 and be used as an animatic with the correct HD screen ratio.
I then start drawing, with the emphasis on poses, expressions, camera moves, dialogue...all the info needed to tell a story.
Here is my board for episode 6 of 'Dead Ringo'. I'm using this as an example as it is one of the last things I worked on with some help from Lili, and had to communicate what was going on in each scene...
As you can see, it's pretty loose but gets all the information across that's needed. It is a little sloppy insofar as I haven't marked the CUTS between scenes, but that was mainly because Lili knew what I had in mind.
And because it's drawn to the correct screen ratio, the panels can be enlarged and used as layouts for the final animation as in this sequence in which Lili added the final characters on different layers to my storyboard panel
Here's another board sequence, and some rough animation based on the panels...
So basically it's communicating a film as you see it in your head!
dededos
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