As the title suggests, this week we were going over the topic of storyboards, not just their importance in the production pipelines for animations and movies and films, but also the various techniques animators may use when creating them along with the various do’s and don’ts. Storyboards are roughly hand-drawn key frame sequences of the script to plan out the cinematography, camera movement, staging and actions within a given scene which helps the animators visualize what the sequences of the final production may look like. Some of the main things to keep in mind when creating storyboards are the staging of the scenes (which mainly focuses on silhouettes, distance from the camera, and perspective of the scene), camera movements (the setting of the scene panning around the location), framing of the scenes (one-two-three – shot framing, over the shoulder, establishing shot, screen side, rule of thirds in composition, 180 camera rule), lines of action for character movements (mostly in keyframes as sometimes it may not be possible for in-betweens), visual storytelling in the storyboarding (as in, the different scenes of the storyboard should progress the story being told in the project and should not be stagnant. This can be also helped with words added to the storyboard to help illustrate what is happening).
After going over these aspects of creating storyboards the class has been given a task to create a storyboard of a flour sack jumping in an arc to show our understanding of the topic, this is mostly focusing on thumbnail poses of key poses.
Afterwards we also had another task, this time making a storyboard of a flour sack over a cauldron making an evil potion, which will makes us use more techniques than the previous task’s storyboard, which will be more framing and camera movement-focused. Here is the storyboard I created for this task:
We were also given descriptive text detailing what would happen in each of the scenes to give us some direction when making this storyboard. As these tasks were just warm-ups under a limited time, there was no chance to fully go in-depth into the making of these scenes, however I believe I still did a good job in keeping all of the techniques of storyboarding in mind, especially staging. For our homework we were tasked with taking what we learned from this week’s class and using it to make a storyboard for our scene we will be animating as part of our group project. In order to not be stepping on anyone’s toes, we consulted the overall story of our animation and determined who does what segment. I volunteered to do the scene that takes place after the crab is getting tortured which will take place in a restaurant where the main character along with a few of his friends within the mafia are talking about their aspirations:
When creating this storyboard I made sure to keep in mind the techniques we learned this week like staging with things like the 180 rule and one-shot scenes and establishing shot scenes to properly follow conventional flows of visual storytelling, however I think I could have improved in a few areas, like screen side, however with all things considered I believe this could very well be used for the animated scene I am planning to make.