Animation journal: script & Storyboard

Today, let’s talk about the filmmaking process. If you are not familiar yet, one of the most important steps is Storyboarding. It includes drawing frames (mostly black and white) arranged in an order to describe the continuation of actions and situations in the movie. In a word, it’s like you read a comic book in which each frame will tell you some information, like a character's feelings or actions. The more actions appear, the more frames the artist will draw. Storyboard for animations is also based on that foundation, but the technique will be slightly different. Here is an example.

Storyboarding is also a way for crew members to understand the story and their upcoming tasks fully. The frames in the storyboard needn’t be drawn too detailed or as outstanding as the story pages, but instead, it needs to convey important information about emotions, acting, camera angles, surroundings, perspective, transitions, etc. Generally, storyboarding takes into account many factors. If the Director is directing the movie, then the Storyboard Artist can be considered as a mini-Director and both will work closely together.

Our animation also has a Storyboard and 4 months before the deadline to submit the film, we were still editing the storyboard. Up until now, we have a storyboard collection. With the same story, we invented so many ways to tell it. Below is one of the storyboards in the direction of bloody kung-fu action.

Our short animation involves up to 6 or 7 people storyboard artists, and each artist made up for the other's shortcomings. Doesn’t it sound sophisticated? Each artist has different creativity, so we ended up gaining lots of interesting perspectives for our stories.

With today's technology, you can draw storyboards on your computer, extremely fast and conveniently. However, what if we don't have a computer or a drawing board? That's okay, we can always draw on paper. It doesn't matter what you draw with, or how. What matters is the transparency of every frame. Obviously, this is the information you want the audience to see. In short, storyboarding is very important and we are proud to say that we do have, guys ^^.

Here are some storyboards on both paper and computer.

Animation journal

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Leo DINH