Storyboarding

Now you're ready to storyboard your characters. My first pass on story boarding was of my main character Michiko. I wanted a shot of her turning her head toward the camera and smiling. You can build your storyboards in another notebook or you can do it on loose paper with a three ring binder. I use the latter method although I am moving to some storyboard software. It's expensive software so I don't recommend it unless you are absolutely serious about producing a story. The software won't do the work for you but when you have 90 minutes of story to do then a few tools can speed it up. To figure out what I wanted with Michiko turning her head I drew wide boxes on a piece of paper. Kinda like a comic strip. If there's dialog then it goes below each box. I've seen other animation companies use boxes that go down the page rather than across (the dialog goes next to each box) but this doesn't seem to have the same flow as going across. The head turn for Michiko was six storyboard frames. I started with a side view of her head. The next frame showed her head turning about 45 degrees towards the camera. The next shot has her staring into the camera with a calm look on her face. Then we see her eyes half open. Next frame we see her eyes closed. Her eyes snap back open and she opens her mouth in amazement. A simple scene but you can see the importance of story boarding before just jumping into the animation. The storyboard is a road map like the script is but this one but adds the detail of character movement and camera angles. My storyboard ends up being my road map for key-frames. Key frames ensure that the motion of your characters goes to the right place at the right time.