Storyboarding and the Story Reel - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 43

If you have a physical wall full of storyboards, grab a yardstick, tell the story and begin to direct your audience's
attention to the relevant boards. If you are doing it digitally, you can show each image full screen with the
slideshow feature of any number of applications such as IrfanView, iPhoto, or Google's Picasa™. In either
case, the point is to show someone who doesn't already know the story the storyboards, while you narrate. This
last point is critical because what you are looking for here is feedback on what the viewers misunderstood
(or completely failed to understand), what they thought went on too long, whether your jokes worked, and if
anything just plain didn't make sense. Sometimes when you've lived with a story for several weeks or months,
certain things become so obvious to you that you completely forget to mention them to your audience. Doing
this, while potentially cringe inducing, is a valuable part of the short animation creation process. It's a chance
to get the bugs worked out of everything long before you begin to put in the real time and hard work. Also,
you may have lived with the story for so long already that the plot points, jokes, and twists may have lost their
punch for you. A fresh audience can, hopefully, restore your faith in the project.
Of course, there will be problems. One of the benefi ts of working with storyboards, though, is that they are
quick to make and easily replaced. If your test audience pointed out that you missed giving out a crucial bit
of information, add a couple of new storyboards. If you are having diffi culty getting a strong vision of a cer-
tain set of actions, storyboard it from several perspectives and see which works best.
Rearranging sections of your story can help too, but that is easier to do in real life with physical cards than
it is to do digitally. If you want to rearrange entire sections of your digital storyboards, it can be a little more
involved because we want to keep the images in the proper sequence when the fi les are arranged alphabeti-
cally. It will become easy to rearrange digital sections in the next step, so you may want to wait until then.
Whatever the case, you should come out of the process with a series of storyboards that properly lead the
audience through the story you intend to tell. At this point, if you have been working with physical story-
boards, you will need to scan them into your computer as a numbered series of image fi les. When scanning, it
is a good idea to follow the naming and size/aspect ratio conventions mentioned earlier in this chapter. The
need to scan and name each of the sketches is one of the arguments for creating the storyboards digitally to
begin with. The Beast has only 86 storyboard sketches, and I would not have wanted to scan them all.
Recording a Temporary Soundtrack for Timing
Remember back during the story creation process where we had you acting out the story in real time to
make an estimate of the running length? Well, it is time to fi nalize that process. In the next step, you will be
compiling your storyboards into an animated, timed slideshow, set to a temporary sound track.
Grab a cheap PC microphone, fi re up whichever bundled sound recording application came with your sys-
tem (you can see Chapter 8 for more information on recording sound), and get ready to act again. What fun!
You had no idea you'd be up to these kinds of shenanigans when you started this project!
Your vision of the story has no doubt solidifi ed as you worked through storyboard creation. You should have
an excellent idea at this point how the story will actually function on screen.
Press Record in your sound application and act the story directly into the microphone, visualizing the story-
boards while you do so. If more than one person talks at a time in your production, get a friend to help you.