Moho Forum

I'm starting a 4min short and curious the best way to move forward in ASP6.

I have the audio rough and I'm thinking about doing some of the storyboard drawing in AS, and some of the panels will be scanned in sketches.

How do you use the storyboard or animatic as reference for the final animation work? For instance there is the "Show tracing image" feature but I'd have to render my animatic as a sequence and load/unload the image for every single frame, as the trace image only loads one image at a time.

You can't preview with a layer set to multiply and only vectors will show up at a percentage of opacity. So you can't use your animatic as an overlay, only use it as a standard layer under your character--which would cover up facial expressions...

Curious to know what works for you. Sorry for all the posts lately, just very excited about working in AS. Thanks!

You don't want to do all the 4 minutes in one single file, don't you? Instead you want to break it down into single shots. This way you keep the number of imported storyboard images to a minimum.

If you really want to trace over imported images, think about making them lighter in Photoshop or whatever bitmap software you use, just for tracing. Add a layer of white and set it to about 60% opacity. This way you have an image that will not interfere with what you draw over it in AS.

There is a script for loading images from a file that puts into a switch layer.

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=4180125

Dale

Dale, thank you very much. Is that a different script than the one that comes with ASP6?

Slowtiger, I'll definitely break up the animation to smaller parts, but I'm trying to do the storyboard/animatic in its entire 4min length. I gave up trying to draw and produce the animatic in AS, I'm doing that in Flash now. After that is done I'll know where to break it up for animation in AS.

So when the animatic is done, my only option is to use a script like Dales and put the animatic as a bottom layer or import a quicktime render of the animatic correct?

Ya, it loads everything. doesn't care about names orders. And it not my script.

Dale

You could change the trans of your working layer, and or add a white layer with semi trans to assist.
BTW I use TBS storyboard pro at work, it is universally despised by us all but equally indispensable.

Hey Chucky,

Most of the (tv) studios seem to require working in SBPro. What don't you like about it? I've been thinking about getting it, but I don't have the dough. Its pretty damn expensive for what it does...

I read that a boarder at Disney uses TVpaint. I almost bought that over AS, but the vector bones/point animation in AS makes indy production possible for one person.

Celtx is ok for print formatting but it doesn't have drawing tools and image pan/zoom.

I got fed up with Switch Layers and the drawing tool doesn't seem to have the same feel as Flash's brush tool.

I'm not knocking AS for animation, seems great, but its not geared for fbf--which I realize it was never intended anyway.

I would never use any software to draw a storyboard, not even with my years of experience. I'd do it on paper, where I can draw much faster, cut out and re-arrange panels, have the whole sequence visible in front of me, am not limited in any way to create weird pans, and so on.

I will of course use software to clean up the storyboard a bit, to add text, and to create a version which is useful to other people or sell the film.

Howdy,
I've been boarding since the late eighties and I couldn't wait to go digital, all that frapping around with paper and scissors and redrawing worn out scraps, on large projects isn't great for workflow.
I remember being poopooed by my fellow boarders before wacoms and the like came to be affordable, when I first suggested it in the mid ninetees on a feature with thousands of board images- they said it would NEVER happen , nyuk nyuk.
On of the advantages of TBS storyboard is the ability to do large camera moves and have it reproduced in print both as psd or jpg and really good PDFs that has a great template system.
The drawing tools are a little crappy but good for clean up.When I work freelance I prefer using painter and importing the images to TBS where the rest of the process works pretty well.
There are a few more downsides, unreasonably large file sizes, no 'save as' function that requires stupid workarounds. Also it is buggy as hell.
I wouldn't buy pro unless you are rolling in dough, I ddo use it at work but it only has a couple of features that are worthwhile, until a new version comes out to iron out the kinks.
Celtx is pretty good too, I really like that program, in fact the dev team there have been using my files to run tests to improve the storyboard feature, I'm one of the project of the week winners- so proud it won't take much to make celtx very robust for boarding as long as the drawings are done elsewhere.

I did use to use TV paint/mirage for animatics sometimes, but I had my dongle stolen from a hotel room. I don't think I'll buy that again, it was (good, great for frame by frame and all sorts of other cool stuff) but too expensive and the actual storyboard add-ons where really poorly devised ,counter intuitive and a PITA.

So that's what I think, TBS needs radical improvement, but there is no tool that can rival it ATM if only for the way it handles text fields and generates PDFS to feed back into the production cycle.
I think Slowtigers points are perfectly valid, but IMHO with a cintique or a tablet pc the physical connection is just great, and digital is clean, workable and highly adaptable method for generating storboards.

I Use Flash for all my boards. Have done for years.
It's a white bit for drawing in and a timeline.

Obviously I thumb on paper first. Then time/slug it. Then draw up in Flash. Adding as many poses as I need. I've not needed a hard copy of a board for years. I go from Flash to After Effects for animatic. Obviously its very easy to use the jpg sequence as a pdf if needed.

I started as a boarder 20 years ago now. When I think of the pain of doing it all on paper. Yikes. What a waste of trees.

The animatic is just about finished. I basically used thumbnails, since no one needs to see it but me.

I ended up doing most of the panels on paper and for camera moves and fbf I worked in Flash.

I really appreciated hearing from you all. For me personally, if I could work with just paper and a pen and have an assistant scan/label/layout/edit my boards--well that would be heaven!

I don't know about you, but my thought process changes. I can draw ok with my Wacom but its my creative thinking that gets stifled when trying to draw on the computer. I like seeing an ocean of thumbnails across a page all at once so that I can get a feel for the story flow. But it was time consuming to scan each sheet and cut out/resize and save each thumbnail as a panel.

What I might try next is to bring my thumbnail template (15 to a sheet) into Photoshop. Draw my boards there, and then create a custom Action to save the thumbs on the page. I'm not sure if its possible to create such an Action but we'll see. At least I wouldn't have to scan anything and maybe being able to see all the thumbs would help me feel more comfortable.

I'm starting to understand how difficult it must be for a software developer. Everyone works in different ways. It must be hard to develop one thing that's going to work for a multitude of people.

Nice to know that it worked out for you. I heartily agree about how important it is to see all panels at once.

When I scribble a storyboard, I work very fast and don't do complete drawings - often it's just a frame filled with a bit of shadow. These scribbles are also very small, thumbnails indeed. I haven't been able to reproduce this workflow on-screen - in this stage of the process I need the softness of a real pencil.

Later on, when the storyboard is kind of fixed, I don't mind to clean up drawings on the Cintiq or on paper. And I definitely use software when it comes to add dialogue and make the whole thing printable.

(In 1992 computers where introduced at Hahn Film in Berlin. The storyboards for the next upcomig films were drawn on paper, but all panels were scanned in by Yours truly, and arranged in a custom-made RagTime file. My first scanner was a hand-held 8-bit grayscale scanner, just wide enough for the panels which were about 8 cm high. The whole process was slow and tedious, and quite often the files were too big for the then-available computer memory, although I had the pleasure to use a Quadra 950.)

I want to pass a tip I heard from Joanna Quinn (http://www.berylproductions.co.uk/, some drawings of her http://images.google.com/images?q=Joanna+Quinn) last year. She explained that she uses to scribble her storyboards very small, then enlarged those thumbs to storyboard format and maybe clean them up a bit, then enlarge these drawings further to her actual animation format. This means that her original first impression gets directly onto screen. (See her first big success "Girl's Night Out" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ficrLSm-dYk)

Just bear in mind that nobody forces you to only use one single tool in your workflow. If you're happy with carving your ideas into sliced potatoes, stick to it. If you want to only use digital means, do so. But if you notice you run into restrictions, remember that there are more ways to skin a goat than to use software.

chucky wrote:Howdy,
I've been boarding since the late eighties...

Goodness me you're old.

That explains a few things Chucky Cheese.
The smell in particular

GREAT links Slowtiger thank you! I love fbf animation. I'm trying to figure out how to bring some of that energy into AS.

I appreciate the tip. I couldn't agree more that the key to keeping your animation "alive" is to weave its initial spirit throughout the process. Especially with computers its all too easy to get caught up in how the software behaves verses how your character should behave. I try to do a mental check every so often, "ok is this how the character should move, or is this just the easiest way to make this work in...(software of choice)."

I just add an entry on http://www.enigmation.de with a scan of my "storyboard" - just to show that I don't really spend much time on that step.