Storyboard Research and Notes

Over the two week break I have been tasked with finishing the storyboard for Ugly Fish Dinner with Max, Corrie and Bella. While I have had experience in storyboarding previously on personal projects I'm eager to work with a group of people on a storyboard. 

 Online I found a lot of very helpful resources surrounding storyboarding and very influential and successful productions and companies that have made great use of the storyboarding process, including Disney, Pixar and Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite, 2019)

"Instead of writing with words, we write with drawings" 
Balances
-Composition
-Cutting
-Writing
-Staging
-Acting

All of these things need to be constantly kept in mind for storyboard artists while working
The pros of working in a team include the fact that everyone is coming up with ideas that could make the sequence better. Storyboarding is also known as story-re-boarding. lots of going back, changing things around, trying out new ideas/shots etc. to make sure you have the best possible outcome. People tend to have ideas that expand on previous ideas, sharing our work and work in progresses can be very beneficial to everyone and can help come up with spontaneous ideas and different takes on a situation that may have been overlooked, as well as highlight any issues or concerns that one person may not have noticed or considered yet. 

You don't have to be Michelangelo, or a great animator. you need to be a great communicator 
storyboards allow for a blueprint for animators to see before entering production. 
like comic book panels of the entire movie 
Continuinity, staging, acting, cameras ,dialogue, develops the story
cheaper to work out before entering production and running into issues. 
the minimum amount of information necessary to get dynamic quick reads on content and emotions of the sequence 
looking for emotion and heart to connect 
storyboard artist needs to be a good story teller, needs the meaning and feelings of what you want to say 
storyboard > story reel

Walt Disney began to get noticed for the quality of his films, which could be accredited to his use of storyboarding, which was not commonplace at the time. Over the years this technique was also adopted into Disney's range of live action films, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and now storyboards are used in almost every film, cartoon or media production in the world 

"If I can make things work on paper, I can make them work on the set, and if I can create a visual style on paper, I can absolutely create it on Gods green Earth." - Kevin Costner, Director, Open Range.

Using storyboards as a story writing/telling tool. Storyboards allow you to watch the entire film before shooting it. Storyboarding all of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe was a "an expensive writing tool, but a really inexpensive production tool."

Act and direct, anticipating how you will shoot something. Add your own touches to the materials, establish film language, giving freedom to storyboarders adapting a script allows for ideas the directors or writers might never have thought of.

tool for staging, where to set cameras, what effects there might be. a picture is worth a thousand words. 

A great storyboard artist has that ability to get excited after its been shot down and move on and build the excitement over again.

-You can always simplify on set 
going overboard on the storyboards then narrowing down and cutting of bits that might be unnecessary is easier than underpreparing and trying to improvise on set 

-Storyboards don't need to be complex, focus on conveying key elements as simply as possible, character and camera movements are the first priority.

-You can label if movements are complex. core elements however should be shown. 

-No detail is too subtle to be included if it matters to you or to the story.

Quick fast sketches that you don't grow attached to. if entire shots or sequences get scrapped then its important to not spend too long on details that don't matter/wasting time 

https://conceptartempire.com/what-is-storyboard-artist/

What is a Shot or Scene?

In live-action, the term shot is used. In animation terminology, the term scene is mainly used.

A scene (shot) contains panels. A scene can have one panel or many. All panels in a scene have the same background; each panel contains different actions in it, so when you watch them in an animatic, it looks animated.

-Toon Boom Learn

For Ugly Fish:
New shot for every camera/background change 
New panel for every character movement 

Ugly Fish Dinner 
Storyboard Productions notes

Autosave set to every 5 minutes
Brand new shots to draw:
-Splat Gross up: 2:58

Toon Boom Harmony Storyboard Pro 
-Fixed Width 10pt Pencil

New Hotkeys 
P: Pencil 
B: Paint Bucket 
C: Cutter Tool
S: Contour Editor

Notes

One of the main things we needed to work on between the thumbnails and the storyboards was composition, continuinity and making sure we weren't breaking the 180 rule. we decided not to get too bogged down on these during the thumbnailing process so we could quickly draw them all out and then start refining the drawings and shot compositions. When I began to start drawing the shots into toon boom I made use of the Rule of third grid to make sure the subject of the shot was framed using those rules to help create a clearer composition. A lot of the thumbnails had already taken this into account but it was nice to be able t tweak and stage the characters and backgrounds a bit more accurate. 

Early Shotlist

Before we had a final shotlist to work with I broke down all of the shots within my given scene so I could begin to work on the storyboard and check off the work I was doing as I went. For every image I made sure to list the shot/panel, the camera shot and movement, a description of what happened, the timing where it happened and the duration of the shot approximately rounded to the nearest second. as I finished each shot I used this chart to tick it off to make sure I wasn't missing anything. The final shotlist was still quite helpful though as it did have directors notes to work with, so once they were finalised I went back over my shotlist and my storyboards and made sure t implement those changes.

I found it really helpful having a physical thing to tick of as it made me aware of the progress I was making as well as just how much work still had to be done. I wanted to make sure I was managing my time well and not spending too much time focusing on unnecessary details. I think this helped to allow me to get all of the drawings finished quickly so I could focus more on editing, timing, tweaking and adding in extra panels or things to help make the storyboard run smoothly. Overall I was pretty happy with the progress I managed to make in a week, while there are still some more things to tweak and change I think there's enough there to make a decent start and to start combining the storyboards together.