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Storyboard

General requirements

  • The script of the film
  • Sequence Briefing from the director
  • Concept art and character designs

Goal of the task

Storyboarding is the first step into visualizing the vision of the director.

This is the time to

  • try different angles,
  • beats,
  • acting choices to determine the storytelling in visual format.

The goal is to create a version of the movie that eliminates as many alternative possibilities as possible and is solid enough to be transferred to the next stage: Previz.

Storyboarding using Story Pencil

For the workflow of storyboarding we use the Grease Pencil tool combined with the Story Pencil addon.

The advantage of this workflow is the possibility to combine 2D drawings within a 3d environment which allows us to use 3d environment as a base to create spacial awareness from the beginning that can be used in modeling/previz as a point of reference.

The Story Pencil addon allows us to use the VSE editor in Blender and swap easily between shots and edit, or alter different shots.

Workflow

To start, we have been using rough sketches to simply convey the idea and progression of each shot. A first pass will be shown to the director and any feedback will be addressed.

Once a version is approved by the director, we'll continue to refine the drawings and add more definition to the shot by using a 2 color shading method.

As an initial edit pass with Story Pencil, once we finalize a sequence, the drawings will be exported to individual images for the editorial department. They can use these images to refine the timing and adjust composition to the drawings if needed.