do you storyboard/story reel?

hey Toonboomers,

i am interested to know who here actually storyboards and/or story reels his animation.
i do the visual part and most of the audio part myself for all of my short animations, so i haven’t really thought it would add anything but extra work to my production…
what is your experience? is it helpful if you’re working on your own?

Amin
www.youtube.com/user/tartarstudio

I storyboard, although i use the term lightly. I just do it in Animate especially since it is just for me.

It is super important to do in some form to get the timing right before you commit to it with real artwork. It can save you tons of time.

Honestly mine are so terrible they are just stick figures and scribbles, but I can see if it is going to work, if it needs to be faster/slower etc. If you don’t you often get committed to your actual artwork and don’t want to change those things. In a storyboard you are changing them all the time.

I agree with Lilly and James. You can do it without a storyboard and THINK you are saving time, but in the long run it will increase the quality of your work. It makes a good roadmap or outline for you to work with and refer to.

Take a look at this thread from the Storyboard forum and make sure you watch the clip.

http://www.toonboom.com/support/forums/storyboard/index.php?board=11;action=display;threadid=650

Great link Zeb. Thanks! I love ‘behind the scenes’ videos.

Well for my 2 cents, I find that it helps to plan the flow of shots, even if you’re doing a production all by yourself. The reason is that sometimes you might see something in your head, but when you look at all the camera angles together, the flow doesn’t work very well. Storyboarding will allow you to plan roughly what you’re going to animate before you do it. So you can change camera angles and change timing to get the flow to work really well.

Otherwise what can sometimes happen is that you might invest a lot of time in doing some animation from a camera angle that doesn’t work. Or you might decide to throw out a scene and then you’ve animated something you didn’t need to. :-<br />
~Lilly