Storyboarding and the Story Reel - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 47

mouse button to cancel the transformation because the import will still have taken place, dropping the images
in sometimes very hard to fi nd places in the workspace. Notice (Figure 4.43) the different elements of the
Sequencer Image Strip while it is being moved:
● The numbers on either end of the strip indicate the start and end frames the strip would have if you
accepted the current transformation.
● The fi rst number inside the body of the strip indicates how many images (your storyboards) are con-
tained in the strip.
● The full disk path and fi le name of the fi rst image fi le in the strip is given
Figure 4.43 An Image Strip in transform mode
Move the strip until the indicator for the start frame is 1, meaning that the sequence of images will begin on
frame 1 of the animation. The particular horizontal channel the strip is in is not important right now. Press
the left mouse button to accept the position. If something went wrong and the strip ended up somewhere
other than frame 1, just follow the Blender convention to move something: select the strip with the right
mouse button and press the G key to begin a movement transform.
When the image strip is in proper position, try scrubbing through the VSE's timeline by holding down the left
mouse button and dragging in the workspace. As you scrub across the area occupied by the image strip, you
should see the images display and change in the preview window in the upper portion of the screen. If the pre-
view image is very small, or if you are only seeing an extremely magnifi ed version, position your mouse over the
preview window and use the mouse's scroll wheel and middle mouse button to adjust the zoom and positioning.
If you watch carefully, you'll see that each image occupies only a single frame in time, hardly the effect we're
looking for. In a moment, we'll see how to change that, but fi rst we need to get Blender ready for our animation.
WARNING
If you forget to set the frame rate, resolution, or aspect ratio at this step, it can lead to mis-
matched render sizes, audio/video sync problems, and timing issues that could spell disaster for
your project. If you've saved your project's animation settings as a Blender default as suggested
in the last chapter, you should be fi ne.