VR storyboarding: a naive approach
Recently I've had a chance to talk to other people in the XR space about the work I did on Tales of the Wedding Rings VR (Oculus/Steam) and it's had me reflecting on the planning processes we used. When I joined the team the initial prototype had already been finished and we were starting up production with a fairly clean slate. Despite this, however, there wasn't an established method of documenting direction, so I decided to design one and authored the first drafts of the production.
Here’s a sample:
I called this a "storygraph" instead of a storyboard, as it was less granular in terms of its representation of time and was really designed to plot out the action occurring in the various spaces of our experience rather than specifically inform the animation. Time is represented on the X-axis; it’s read from left to right. The rows or "tracks" which are arranged vertically represent the different spaces, and were assembled from clippings from the source material, hand renderings and screenshots from the Unreal editor. The tracks contained the following:
track 1 : Images from the source material to serve as a rough timeline track 2: The user space as seen from above to orient spatial relationships track 3: The ideal user field of vision per our design intent. tracks 4~6 : The action within each manga panel, in/out transitions, etc.
These was printed out into strips which I would arrange in my cubicle and sometimes the enclosure of black dividers which served as our dedicated VR testing space. The reasons for which I consider this method naive are probably clear to anyone who has worked in VR: 1.) It isn't VR native, therefore it fails to express some of the medium's particulars like depth and 360 degree immersion. 2.) It requires special knowledge, meaning that it isn't intuitive for new members in the team to "just pick up." You have to learn how to "read" the document. 3.) It lacks fine timing details which would otherwise be helpful to animators and other staff. 4.) It paints a deceptive picture of the user experience in that it can lead team members to believe that we have control over the user's field of vision at any given time. We typically don’t. The purpose of the document was to record what the user could see and when and in what order, however it was really just a way for myself to keep track of the director's desired shots. I proposed using Oculus's Quill to produce VR storyboards (which, as it turns out, is the direction that Disney's Cycles team took) but it was thought that we didn't have the resources required to take on what we thought was such a specialized workflow. That said, animators ended up using the storygraphs for the initial layouts after all because: 1.) It were easy to iterate on when changes from the director came in. 2.) It gave a holistic view of an entire scene, whereas a 360 degree VR storyboard might require linear viewing. These kinds of productions definitely require more VR-native workflows, but if adopting or developing such workflows isn't an option for your team you can still get by in the analogue world.
Just for fun, here is one of my very first attempts -- my apologies to anyone who actually reads Japanese:
------------------------ *結婚指輪物語 clippings belong to Square-Enix with characters and stories created by Maybe. They are represented in this article for reference only.