Storyboard – The illustrated bible of the animation

By Hannu Koivuranta, Director of Photography and Lighting Lead:

“If you’re a regular filmmaker you might have a storyboard while shooting or you might not. It backs you up, but on the other hand you may never refer to it and would rather just come up with better shots on location. That’s fine, many people work like that in the film industry.

In animation, however, the storyboard becomes much more important. It is probably the most important creation in the whole process after the script because it shows you, right there, what exactly happens in the animation. The person in charge of making an animatic – the digital skeleton version of the animation – puts it all together from the original storyboard.

Have a look at the extras of Ice Age. There is a short making-of where you can watch the storyboard, the animatic, the previsualization and the final animation side by side: the shots are basically identical.

My first choice of weaponary in the process of creating the storyboard was pen and paper. The original plan was that I draw rough images and our Art Director would then transform them to a more viewer-friendly-versions. This soon proved to be a weak plan for two reasons: I am too much of a perfectionist while drawing, meaning that it took me too long to make a single shot. As a storyboard artist one should be able to create the final image in a matter of minutes. I believe the industry standard goes somewhere between 5-7 minutes. I was making my shots way over 25 minutes a piece. And of course our AD also took her time to make the shots better. It ended up slowing the pace of the project and stacking too much burden for both of us. Then I had an idea.

Our primary software in creating this magnificent animation is an open-source software, Blender. I have the greater part of 7 years of knowledge and experience over Blender, so creating the storyboard WITH the software seemed logical to me. I ended up creating a low-poly environment for our animation and characters, which I would then animate shot by shot with the director. We would instantly see which shots work and which don’t, saving us time, effort and stress since the changes could be made instantly.

While I was working on the storyboard our AD started finishing her blueprints for our characters, which made it possible for our modelers to start working. We are using a collective internet hard-drive through DropBox, so whenever I noticed a new .blend-file Dropping in to the Box (Har har har) I just appended it to my storyboard and voilá – we could see the real models being used in the storyboard itself. I also uploaded the storyboard shots to the Dropbox in separate folders (eg. /Animation/Cinematography/Storyboard/Shot1.1, Shot1.2, Shot1.3 etc.) for clarification. These were .png-images. I later on created a PDF-file with every image (total of 729 images for 62 shots).

Example:

In shot 1 is an empty room with a door and a table. A man walks in to the room and puts a glass on the table.

This would have needed 5-10 images, depending on the importance of the actions. 1 image of the empty room, 1 image of the man and the open door, 1 image of the man walking towards the table, 1 image of the man at the table, 1 image of the man setting the glass at the table, etc. From this sequence we could have eliminated perhaps 1-2 shots. It all comes down to WHAT IS IMPORTANT and how much time you have to figure it out.

Our editor had the possibility of starting the animatic before I was finished with the storyboard entirely, but he chose not to. I understand his decision, but had our schedule been tight we could have sped things up by working on several phases simultaneously.

Having finished the storyboard some time ago, I now feel that some of the “unnecessary material” could have proved to be useful. By this I mean the animations I had made for every shot. If I had a shot where a turkey turns its head and walks out of the screen I would animate it roughly by rotating the whole object and moving it along the X- and Y-axis. So what I basically have is the whole animation. Animated. As a rough version. I offered them to the editor, but he’d rather find the rhythm of the story by using the still images and I totally respect his approach. Of course there is the matter of exporting the animations as video out of Blender, which would have taken several days.”

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