Storyboarding and the Story Reel - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 44

The actual timing of individual words or hard dialog isn't as important right now as getting the overall timing
correct. Make sounds to signal the start and end of actions (grunts, smashing noises, screams, and so forth) so
that you will be able to place their storyboards properly in time.

Place this recording in your project's sound folder under a name such as “dirt track” or “temp sound.” (For
some embarrassing fun, you can fi nd the “dirt track.wav” fi le in the sound folder of the included disc to hear
my own preliminary soundtrack for The Beast.) If the recording program gives you options and formats to
choose from, choose 16-bit WAV format at 44,100 kHz. If not, don't worry about it. Those are the most com-
mon settings. Now open up the slide show viewer you used when you narrated the story for your test audi-
ence, play the audio you just recorded, and try to follow the soundtrack by advancing the slide show manually
at the right times. Give it a few tries to make sure that there are no parts of the action you missed when cre-
ating the temporary soundtrack. If you did miss something, just go back and make a new recording. It will
only take a couple of minutes.

Just like when you were estimating the length of the animation in the story phase, building a soundtrack adds
a real-world time scale to your project.

Assembling a Story Reel in Blender's Sequence Editor

With the storyboards and a rough soundtrack created, you will assemble them into an animated story reel .
When you paged through your storyboards as a slideshow with the soundtrack playing, you were actually
making a temporary story reel on the fl y.

The story reel is a self-playing animation that marries your storyboards to your rough soundtrack. If done
well, it will give an excellent sense of the look and feel of the action in the fi nished animation. In fact, as you
proceed with your work later in the project, you will be replacing the storyboards in the story reel with pre-
views and a fi nal, rendered animation as you complete them. In this way, the story reel evolves over time until
it becomes the fi nal edit of your fi nished, rendered animation!

Because of this, the story reel is vital to your project. All of your work in story, planning, animation, and rendering
come together there. It will be your guide.

You can create your story reel
directly within Blender's Video
Sequence Editor.

The initial story reel fi le for The
Beast is called, “beginning_story_
reel.blend,” and it is available
in the included disc's storyreel
directory.

Let's examine the way that you
build a story reel in the Sequence
Editor. Figure 4.38 The fi nished storyboard-based story reel for The Beast