In this piece, we’re going to be exploring how storyboards are used to plan and visualize animated projects. Storyboards are something that gets mentioned a lot, thrown around in behind the scenes for movies and TV shows, animated or not! Naturally, we’ll be focusing on animation storyboards. These things are strange little sketches to anyone who doesn’t know them. Bizarre doodles with varying levels of detail but nothing too precise and only the important stuff seems to show up in them. Well, that’s for good reason!
Storyboarding is an essential and integral piece of early development. As foundational steps go, animation would be extremely inefficient in both time and resources if storyboarding wasn’t depended upon. It is the beginning and ground-level of planning and visualization for any successful animated project. So, in this blog, we’re going to talk about storyboarding, what it is and why it’s important to an animation project. We’ll also touch on the storyboarding process, tips for effective storyboarding, and how the collaborative nature of storyboarding benefits a project! Let’s dive straight in.
What is Storyboarding?
Simply put, a storyboard is a sequence of drawings representing the shots planned for a film or animation. Every film, TV show, and anime, every piece of moving media for entertainment has no doubt been defined by a storyboard. It is a breakdown of every shot, the important elements it will include, and how audiences will perceive it.
Without something like this as a shot bible, you will be wasting time figuring out what the next shot will be, how to execute it, and what to include. At the bare minimum, the storyboard is a barebones guideline on what you need to look at next. The key components of any storyboard are panels, which are individual frames, followed by sequences, which are a collection of panels. Finally, annotations will be included throughout for any additional context or notes on said panel or sequence.
These panels and sequences are ultimately what a final product should look like. Just with more detail and refinement!
The Importance of Storyboarding in Animation
Any creative will tell you that the importance of storyboarding, and thus pre-planning and preparation, is just as important as the idea and the execution.
Without a proper storyboard and plan to move ahead, you will find your animation stalling and breaking apart once something needs to change or be altered. You might find it stalling as you figure out where to go next! While the plot or next point might be clear, executing that visually is much harder than just writing it.
Storyboards help us visualize the narrative. We get a visual layout of the entire story, getting glimpses at how certain moments or set pieces might come together. These immediately help you in two ways. Maintaining narrative coherence and flow and in picking out any inconsistencies or difficulties that might arise during its actual shooting.
A good storyboard is your plan of shots and scenes. Allowing you to pre-prepare you camera angle, shot composition, and scene transitions, without it – a project is much more susceptible to stalling, becoming disjointed, or disconnected. Storytelling is all about pacing and timing. A storyboard helps you examine the pacing and timing you have in mind, meaning you can make adjustments earlier without causing any disruption to production.
The Storyboarding Process
The storyboarding process falls into three stages:
Concept and Script Breakdown
Translate the script itself into the visual elements. You don’t need to waste time on what characters might look like, just so long as they’re distinguishable from one another. Here, we identify key scenes and moments to begin the storyboard itself.
Sketching Panels
With key scenes and moments, we begin sketching out initial panels. Looking for major actions and expressions, these quick sketches help give us visual context and a feel for how the script will look. For exploring different ideas or executions, try using thumbnails!
Refinement
Once you have a rough but comprehensive establishment of panels and sequences, you can begin to make some refinements. Add some detail and clarity. Annotations here are excellent for context, notes on dialogue, potential sounds, and any movements we need to know about.
Tips for Effective Storyboarding
Our storyboard artists always emphasize three key elements. Clarity, consistency, and simplicity. Is the panel clear on what is happening? Are we maintaining consistency in both style and tone? And finally, are we getting too complicated? In many senses, the saying “less is more” has a lot of weight. Especially when dealing with a storyboard where minimalism, efficiency, and speed is key.
It’s important that motion, emotion, and actions are clearly conveyed. Arrows work, a simple sketch of a face to get the emotion across, speed lines. These things almost seem childish but they work and they’re clear. That’s all that matters!
We cannot speak enough on readability and ease of interpretation. That is why clarity is first among our key elements. Don’t forget what storyboarding is for. Don’t get bogged down in details – just make sure someone can know instantly what is happening!
The Collaborative Nature of Storyboarding
A huge positive and benefit of storyboarding is its natural collaborative nature. A good storyboard will have everyone involved, at least somewhat. The storyboard artists will work with the director, the writers, and animators – each to cover specific elements as well as the whole package. Storyboards are the beginning of a project’s proper collaboration, a meeting point between almost every person on the project.
Like any creative endeavor, it’s all about refinement, feedback, and iteration. It’s important for someone, an individual or small senior group, to have the final say, however. This ensures we avoid the “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Regardless, it’s the first time the whole story and how it might look can be critiqued, observed, and comments made. Take in all the feedback you can. It’s up to you, and whoever is making the final decision, whether that feedback is to be considered properly. That’s a careful balance! The goal is not to preserve anyone’s particular vision (except maybe the director!) but instead it should always be to tell the best story possible within the confines of the intended theme and genre.
Establish an additional step for feedback and revisions, maintain a good record of changes and previous panels and sequences. Never throw out old material, simply file it away and keep it organized! Keep a voice in the room who remembers to balance the creative vision with the practical constraints every project has. Success needs to be achieved, it’s never just given! So fight for it, fight for it with your team and move forward collectively towards a good, enjoyable final result.
