Written by Simon Williams, Storyboard Director.
Storyboarding is a really exciting part of the animation pipeline. It is the very first time we get to see the written ideas from the script, (see our blog about writing scripts here) come to life visually.
But what is a storyboard? Essentially it is the creation of a series of drawings that shows how the story unfolds over the length of an episode.
At Cheeky Little, each episode is created by one storyboard artist who works with the director and uses the recorded dialogue track, which is the voices of the characters speaking the words written in the script, to plan the story’s flow and show all the information needed to create the animation, backgrounds, sound and music. It is a really big task and requires a lot of planning.
The first stage of storyboarding is called ‘thumbnailing’. Thumbnails, like the name suggests, are small simple drawings created quickly that help you decide what angles, characters and shot type you are going to use in the final storyboard. The storyboard artist then uses these to create the final storyboard.
Traditionally storyboards were hand drawn on paper in pencil, made by drawing characters on paper and sketching an approximation of the backgrounds behind. Each single idea or character pose requires a different drawing in its own box or panel. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of different panels to create a five minute episode, sometimes as many as 500, and this used a lot of paper and took a long time. Any mistakes meant rubbing everything out and starting again!
Luckily we are now able to use computers and drawing tablets with a piece of software called ToonBoom Storyboard Pro to speed up this process, and rubbing out and piles of paper are a thing of the past.
When you create each scene in a storyboard it has two important parts. The characters in the shot who have to be drawn in a way that shows what acting they are doing, and the environment where they are standing, known as the background.
Drawing the characters is the fun part. It's great to spend all day drawing funny faces to show the characters speaking, or drawing them in great action poses or tripping over. Anything that the story requires! Less fun is drawing the backgrounds as this requires lots of technical knowledge of perspective, angles, shading and lighting.
You need to be able to draw anything from a chair, to a building, to a mountain seen from any angle. It takes lots of practice and also lots of time, time we don’t always have in the busy schedule of animation production.
Luckily, at Cheeky Little the technical wizards have made the storyboards artist’s job a little bit easier by helping us utilise another piece of software called Unreal Engine to create these backgrounds. (For more info on Unreal engine see a previous blog post here)
To Storyboard In Unreal Engine we create the acting area (or background environment) where the characters walk, run and ‘live’ in the animation that you see on screen. Using a virtual camera we can fly around anywhere we want, at any angle.
To create a storyboard background, the storyboard artist reads the script and places all the character models needed for the story into the background environment. They can then point the camera at the characters to create the shot they need, a wide shot or a close up, knowing that the characters are the right size.
Then, (and this is the clever bit!), we take two pictures, one with the characters in place, and then we turn all the characters off and take another picture of only the background. We then drop both of the pictures into Storyboard Pro and get drawing!
First we use the picture with the characters, they act as a guide for the drawings we are going to produce. It's really important to draw characters accurately with the correct expressions required for the shot. Once we are happy that the action works we turn on the ‘background only’ picture and you have your finished storyboard panel.
Once we have done this for all the panels in the episode, the storyboards are complete and it is sent to the director for checking. If the director is happy the storyboards go to the editor who creates the animatic, adding in sound and music.
It’s a great sense of achievement when you have completed a storyboard and the director sends it on its way, turning your drawings into animation. There is no time to sit back and relax though, as the director usually has another script waiting for you and the process starts all over again!