The Art of The Storyboard - Sneak Peek by special guest Lyndon Ruddy

[Music] hey everybody Aaron Blais here and I'm very excited to announce that we are finally offering a brand new course on storyboarding this is something that we've been getting requests for for so long now and Nick and I have worked very hard over the last six months to put together this course it's an amazing course that I think you're really gonna love and it's being taught by my good friend Linden ruddy now Linden and I have worked together for years and years we work together a digital domain where we were working on the legend of Timbo together he's worked at Disney he's worked at Sony he's currently working at blue sky he's got an amazing amount of knowledge and experience in the industry of storyboarding when I worked with him at Digital Domain I was blown away by his ability to take the concept just an idea and develop that idea into pictures and organize those pictures in a way that you could watch them and feel like you're watching a movie this is why I think he's one of the best story about bored artists that I've ever met he's his ability to kind of manipulate your emotions and pull you through the story through visual means is just an incredible talent that he has and so it was a no brainer for Nick and I to ask Linden to pull this course together and so he spent months actually working the course out and then we shot it over several weeks and and so now it's ready and so we're very excited for you guys to see it I think you're gonna find that it's just absolutely full of information at the end of this course you will absolutely know how the storyboards so I hope you enjoy it we're very excited to be offering it to you and I'll talk to you next time Thanks bye [Music] hi there my name is Linden ruddy and I'm a storyboard artist I would currently work for blue sky studios in Greenwich Connecticut I've been storyboarding for at least 20 years so I have a lot of experience under my belt and I've worked for Disney Warner Brothers Paramount Sony worked for a lot of the big studios so I've learned a lot over the years about storyboarding so the role of the story artist is not only to do camera animation layout and set up a lot of the technical stuff but prior to that in the thumbnailing stage and even prior to that you're required to come up with ideas you have to be able to come up with ways to craft a sequence and be able to troubleshoot for problems within that from a script or from the ideas and be able to solve problems you're selling the ideas and I think that all that adds up to it if if you're doing a chase sequence you're selling it has to be as intense in the final film that's what they're looking for really so the story the job of a story artist now is all-encompassing in all aspects of the film which is why I love to do it in this course that I'd like to show you I'd like to show you a lot of the things that I learned throughout the years some some of the basic fundamentals some of them are a little bit more advanced I'd like to talk about camera work what a story is how it fits into the story real working with the directors pitching lay out how to design layout animation imposing framing where to put the characters eye lines 180 lines you know crossing the axis all of those sort of things a little bit about cutting but showing you little samples of this and at the very end of it I've set up a little storyboard short which is like a little sequence so I'll show you my process of thumbnailing how I arrived at the idea and take just taking on two full boards fleshing it out with a lot of the details that we've talked about throughout the course so enjoy you okay so now I want to get into the next part of our course I want to talk about rule that that is is is kind of overlooked sometimes but it's a basic rule fundamental rule that is difficult to explain to a lot of people but I really want to clear it up once and for all it's called the 180 rule now what that means is you see in the first drawing we have two characters that are across from each other and we place the camera on one side of them now if you look if you look down though if you take this and you look down on these two characters we flipped the camera up now we're looking down this is like a bird's eye view diagram of just a floor plan of where these characters are we we want to keep the eye line devyn looking at each other so there's the eye line the eye line is the the axis line or the 180 line is the line that goes between their eye line that there's that they're looking at each other so we just run that right through you have the left side of the screen and the right side of the screen now this is a side where the green is is where we're just were deciding to put the camera if you go back to that first shot you can see that the camera is on this side which corresponds to this schematic right here so this is the safe area right there that's that's that's where we want to be with the camera I'll show you why so this is called a 180 line now if we look at this next drawing we see where the green is and the camera is on that side and we can move the camera in and out up and down all around but we have to stay on that that side of the eye line you can move it up move it down move over to her so this looks like that when we're shooting through that camera lens this is what it looks like we're on him and we shoot on her now if we go back to you know the schematic of where that camera is on the 180 line if you cross over onto the other side of that and see that green part represents the other side of that so if you're looking down it would mean that this green is on the left side on the opposite side so and that's wrong you actually don't want to cross that line so if you look at that the way this looks like in a cut you can film him from from this side the first time we were on and then if you jump to the other side of that 180 line she just pops into the same position you see that that he's in so it's a jump we're crossing that line we are literally going from the right side to the left side which is wrong you want to stay on on keep the camera on that one side the whole time your audience will get confused and one character looks like they pop in from one to the other and your audience will be disoriented and when that happens they'll disengage emotionally from the film because it doesn't look like these two characters are looking at it at each other if we go back to keeping it on the 180 line clearly you can see with the space in between them on the right and on the left that they're actually looking at each other without even having to be in each other's shot so that's how the confusion can come about when you're crossing that line so this is simple rule to follow all the time and if you want to take that a little step further because I've had you know students ask me okay what happens how do you change that line what if the eye line changes what happens well let's just give an example right here these two characters are looking at each other okay the same way we've set up we're shooting kind of over the shoulder of the guy shooting focusing on her on the right side now to change the eye line if we hear somebody offstage and Ralph comes in offstage and he goes hey Jim he looks off stage they both look now that that sets up another eye line that goes the other way so it pivots so when we cut around we the eye line is now between these two guys so the 180 line has now changed it's gone from between these two characters but as soon as he turns it sets up a 90 degree shift in that 180 line so now the 180 line is between these guys so when we cut back we include all three characters we can see that we haven't crossed the axis at all when we back up to this we've changed the B axis line the 180 line we're still on the right side of it this side we haven't changed and the characters aren't are popping they're in the the right it's right cutting pattern so yes so let's look at a schematic of how that works just a little floor plan here so we started off with the shot where we're looking at both of them and that's their ally and we're setting up that there's there's the 180 the green area that's the area that's safe too Juden we don't want to cross to the other side of them to establish a new 180 line he looks off stage he hears the guy come in all of a sudden you see how it shifts and the camera now chefs behind him and the 180 line has now changed so that's that's a clear setup that's that's a you can this is safe to do this so the camera is on the same side of the character in the 180 line and we can move the camera within the range from the front of them all the way around to behind them so this this this camera is very mobile you know shots look like this we can shoot in front we can shoot 3/4 we can shoot profile we can even shoot behind them behind them 3/4 or just completely behind them but we never want to cross over that line we'll stay on one side or the other so this is what they look like so this would be a character you know in action talking to somebody that you know more more straight on but right on the line a little bit off that 180 line but never crossing over and on the other side this could be a profile a character acting you may be slapping their head you know profile shots could be used for like thinking or reacting or pondering so there's many emotional reasons why you could use these shots and again for two characters that are are in conflict it's nice to cut out to a profile shot to see how they the context and how they relate to each other so there's an example of that so another dimension you could add to this we've talked about first of all we talked about the shot selection your camera long shot medium close-up moving the camera horizontally in closer to the character as we want to get see the emotions and more engaged in the story and the characters but there's another dimension you can add to that that really enhances a storytelling whereas a shot selection again brings the audience in and out of the emotion you can also enhance it by moving the camera up and down okay so the first example would be a low angle you see in this schematic diagram here the of the camera is lower lower than the eye level of the character so in this little thumbnail we're gonna show next we see that the character that the camera is is this is what you don't want to do the camera is at normal eye level but if you want to heighten the drama more all you do is or the camera and you can see how much more in the second thumbnail how much more it Hans's the drama now the character becomes large looming in the frame and much more frightening and menacing you can see the difference between one is is okay I mean that's pretty good to use the one on the left the first one right here but this second one once you add once you lower the camera and and and and add that dimension of an angle to it it really makes it more dramatic it pushes the drama and the emotion of the scene so you'd see that's less dramatic and more dramatic so the use of a low angle like I said before is actually used for 4/4 power to the character assumes a lot of power but it can also use vulnerability too as well so in this case here the character is shocked and surprised it's just an idea to take the audience away from the regular eyeline shot and it can't we tilt the angle a little bit and bring down the camera and it heightens the drama of it whether it's a character who's more powerful or more afraid it reinforces the emotion but in this case here I want to emphasize that low angle up shots usually represent power but then we switched to another shot and we can hear we can see in this shot too it's a low angle looking up but he's not necessarily more powerful in this shot the guy on the right who's bigger is actually looking up at a character on the screen and he appears much more powerful even though he's smaller because he's at the top part of the screen so this is an example of an up shot where the character doesn't appear powerful they appear actually weaker and more vulnerable so the low angles can work either way you can have them like I used the example before of a character you know powerful and big and threatening or you could use the example of it where as you see here where they're a little bit more vulnerable they got a big wall to climb over to get to the other side so it doesn't necessarily mean that they're big and powerful it just heightens the drama and so and here's another example of a character but this is them this time they are more powerful they have their at the standing standing at the top of a hill a cliff so they appear like they're surveying their land and they've got control of the shot and they're higher up in the frame now the other example is our our high angles when the cameras down you look in the schematic you see the cameras looking down on the girl who's on the ground so this can have the appearance of being very vulnerable so once you raise that camera up above the eyeline all of a sudden the character starts to feel much more vulnerable you can see here in this example it's the character on the ground feels threatened by the character that's standing up but we place a camera above the eye line to reinforce that character's vulnerability so even though it's not a point of view from the character on the ground we still feel emotionally for that character because the camera is looking down on them almost threatening them we feel like we're with the guy threatening so we might look at that character on the ground of feel and feel for them other examples of down shots would be if you cut away to something you know this is a high angle shot is really nice to establish say somebody's keys are on a table somebody's walking around the shot going now I forgot my keys I forgot my keys then you cut away it's a very clear way to establish something that's missing book keys or anything like that so you can use it use a high angle to very clearly establish what's in the scene what you're what the story point is another example is if again this is a use of power in the shot even though it's a down shot a high angle sometimes they can be used for vulnerability but in this case they're used to show power the same girl who was on the mountaintop before is now standing there looking down at this wolf who's walking around but she seems to have more power because she's more in the foreground and she's looking down at it so even though it's a high angle it still shows that she has the power and even though she's at the bot of the screen she's bigger in the frame so she appears to be much much more powerful so camera angles can do a lot for emotion it depends how you use them to enhance it use a shot selection to move your camera in and out to show the character's emotions and your even the combination with the camera angles you can heighten your emotion and your drama here's here's another example a really rough drawing of two characters standing off in a room it's good for establishing as well you can you can use it for establishing shots high angles can show you everything around so when you have your in your shot selection your long shots your establishing shots sometimes you can raise a camera up to show the audience everything that that is around just like the same with low angles if you pull the camera out wide enough you can establish the area so you can use your camera height up and down to use this with your shot shot selection as establishing shots here's another example of a low angle of a car driving through the city it's very dramatic it heightens the the the intensity of the shot if the camera is right in front of the car following it another technique to use are canted or Dutch angles these angles are really good for showing of the characters confused or if they're dizzy or the whole world is collapsing in and around them you just tilt the camera and it shows a very vulnerable character you can use this in combination with and you don't even have to be close on these shots you could use this in combination with your camera angles high and low angles and really get some serious drama out of these characters here's another example of a tilted camera angle where this character in the foreground is is gonna be speared by this character in the mid-ground so you've got a lot of depth to this shot but the cameras tilted because it heightens the drama so these are different ways you can use camera angles heighten the camera above or below the eye line again they can show power they can show vulnerability they can establish they can again they can you know they can establish your snare high angles can show vulnerability they can show location it's a great clear way to show something where something is in a room they can show power high angles as well and they can establish again like I said they could show dramatic like in a car chase very drop dramatic again they can show vulnerability high angles can show character's vulnerable so these are some examples of how to use angles in combination with shot selection you get that balance to really drag out the emotion of the character you so this next section is all about the moving camera as I saw with their section on cutting we can link ideas together through cuts but this is an alternative way to do it you can also link them through through camera moves moving the cameras with with a pan we can use dollies push ins tracks and we can smoothly go from one idea to the other without that jarring cut they're used a lot for impact there are many ways to use camera moves so let's look how at how some of them can be used the first one I'd like to talk about is the pan tilt so this idea of the camera move would be to to pan across from one character to another or move with the character as they're moving across the room or across a field or whatever your action is so my process for that would be to lay out in a higher resolution or just if the resolution you have whatever is gonna work for you is the whole camera move just this is just to rough it out this is how I do it so in Photoshop I'll lay down a layer okay so I'll just draw a quick rough frame and then I'll figure out my ground planes roughly where I want the character to be and my grids around here let's say there's a rock you know I'm just laying a background layout here is that a little bit then I start plotting out in this pan where the character is just as placeholders here it's really rough really loose and yeah so I'm just really roughly plotting that out I'm gonna draw a knight I'm drawing a knight here cuz I love I love the idea of the Knights armor and the swords with the shield I love I love drawing this because the knight or the sword is so long and it's it's it gives the hand a nice composition when you're drawing it and the shield is around so it really contrasts that shape of the sword and that's why I love I love to draw stylized knights in armor like this so this is just a character I made up just to represent this so this is a rough idea let's just put something there that this character was doing now the drawings don't have to be detailed it's just kind of like a placeholder for the idea like you can see how rough I'm actually drawing this and then see here okay so the Knights gonna probably gonna end up there and maybe back there we'll put a guy on a horse maybe is some enemy or some somebody's coming to attack him or maybe even give a mess message whatever so this will be normal this would be my undo button up there so this will be the shield see that and thanks moving this way right the line of action so this is how I'm gonna roughly layout this camera move very quickly I didn't spend a lot of time on it because I want to make sure I capture the emotion of it and the movement really quickly and this this thumbnail might even be something that you could you could show a director you could do something like this in an in a in a thumbnail pass when you're pitching your ideas and you have a you know you're pitching that the night is over here by the cauldron let's say this is a cauldron over here you know he's maybe maybe it's maybe he's he's he's building a sword or he's or he's heating up his sword or he's doing something shaping his sword there was a rock over here by himself you know maybe his horses over there somewhere it's a thumbnail that gets the idea across so even something like this I could say to the director okay if I put a couple of arrows there this is what happens the knight is is that his cauldron he's maybe maybe he's cooking soup I don't know what he's doing but he's he hears something then he moves across into these poses quickly runs and confronts this Horseman coming there in the background so that will give the director I'll just tighten up the framing that will give the director an idea of what what I want to do here right it's very rough and loose but it just says that says okay this is this is what we want to do okay so we talked about the construction how I laid out that pan in a thumbnail so now we're gonna go into I'm gonna show you how I'd fleshed it out I went ahead and and did the drawings anyway but I kept them really loose really rough because I find I think storyboard drawings can be loose and rough as long as they're clear and convey the emotion and the acting of the character and you can even see so in this first drawing here you can see how I've what I decided to do as far as acting of this character because when I laid that out I thumbed it out with the idea of the construction of the pan and the character the main thrust of the story point but when I went back into it I decided to instead of having him him make a sword I went as I went back in later I decided to have him do some acting and practice his swordsmanship he's got a cauldron there maybe it's a supper soup or he's camped out there overnight but he's obviously a military guy who's who's hiding from the enemy let's just say that so he's practicing and you can even see here that I've drawn him through the other side this cauldron is supposed to be on top of him but I think that's okay because it keeps the liveliness of the movement of the character is enough to show the director to get the story point across that he's acting you could go in there after and I'll show you how we can just erase that leg so the cauldron looks like it's in front of him so right now I have him acting he's swinging his sword around and he stands up for a sec and pauses and then you know he's adjusting his sword you know he's he's finished doing his movement then all of a sudden he hears galloping horse foot ho step and he looks around he's what is this so he runs towards that we have him go past the camera we've worked all that out and we see how he confronts his horsemen coming up so there's that simple it's just as simple and clear as that we can see this let me rewind this to show you all in the fluid motion so when I pitch this so we've went from this from this rough that I've laid out thumbnail into when he's ready to confront this horsemen very rough very loose I may go in there and tighten up things like eyes to make sure they're clear which I can show you how we can do that and then maybe erase that leg and behind there so let's do that okay so now we're gonna pick this shot back up this pan shot and I said we're gonna go in and maybe tighten things up and erase the leg here just so we can see the depth you can see here I've got a lot of layers so what I'm gonna go in there right now to do is I'm gonna delete a lot of those unnecessary layers because they do bog the files down and when you're pitching and you're in the room and you've got a heavy file and your pit pitching we'll talk about how to pitch to the directors later on but pitching is basically showing your storyboard sequence to the directors and the writers and the producers but you don't want heavy files to bog things down because sometimes computers crash and the drawings don't click from one to the other as smoothly as you'd like so I'm going in there look how many layers I've deleted now I've got a file size of probably about you know I'd say six megabytes compared to the to the 28 that I had already with all those those levels on there okay so we're gonna sit I'll clean this up a bit what I what I like to do is in here is I'd like to focus on the face now if you notice I said I was drawing loose keep your drawings loose loose doesn't mean drawing sloppy loose is taking the anatomy that you know like the chest right here to get a layer on there and and drawing it like this is a stylized character but all the anatomy is still there so I would draw and this characters line of action is this way I could probably do that in red so you could see that is there's a line of action through this character so you can very clearly see like if I'm you'll want to make that pose very strong and clear you can see the arms up there the legs here this leg is even though if the cauldron is in front I still draw everything in the pose and the attitude on the face very clearly so that this is a cool little thing if you don't know this is when in animation when we're learning to animate it's called silhouettes posing so that you should be able to color this in in a silhouette and very clearly see the attitude of the body language of the pose you won't get the facial expression you don't you just you don't want to color it in but I'm just saying as a test to see if your pose is clear so let's get rid of all these other layers here and I'll show you you could see that very clearly that that's a silhouette of somebody and with the sword let's see we're going to put that sword there hang on there we go so with that sword you very clearly get that pose nice nice lines of action moving and that's very very clear silhouette pose so it's a strong pose so and that's a night and then the next pose he's swinging his sword up so it's very clear though the poses have to reflect the action and the attitude of the care that's going on he's he's a knight practicing it he's obviously practicing a sword fighting so let's so let me just go in there and finish off erasing this so I'll erase that and behind there and then I'll probably go in and tighten up his face a little bit this way I get I don't spend a lot of time on this but I have enough time to make sure get that brush down there so I'll go in something like this you can see that it's already taking shape he's got this almost like a mr. incredible face this hair yeah his hair is like like that you know just like that there yeah okay so that's it a little bit smoother you know I like to draw a little construction just to keep it nice and loose see that's not sloppy that's loose so what I don't like to see is I don't like to see dots for eyes except for maybe super long shots where you might you might not be able to get the detail something like that for storyboarding that's fine but when we want to get in closer like this when we're close enough to see cuz this is a wide shot but we are close enough to see face a little bit of expression this again this goes back to our shot selection this is wide enough where we want to see his body language move and I'm using and moving him through through the de frame I'm moving him through the frame a lot so let's go back and look at this okay you can see that the silhouette poses each one of these if you if you drew out in a silhouette you'd see how clear it is exactly what he's doing but I've also chosen the wider shot because he's doing this this action and that's what I need for it I do want to clarify the face in the eyes a little more though in these things the rest of it can be loose but that face has to be clear so let's kind of look at that a little bit and like that I want to make the line quality match so I might go in there so the head doesn't look too different but that heads on a different layer so there there you go so you can you can see right away there that we have we've clarified that face a little bit more okay so we can see that attitude but everything's there it's a route rough drawing really loose but it's not sloppy it's not a sloppy drawing so let's go into the next one same thing here let's get rid of these layers just to make sure it's a lighter file size we don't want any kind of glitches when we're pitching because when you're pitching and the directors and producers are waiting when you're showing your sequence to the directors and they're waiting for things like it to load it can get very impatient because their time you know is very valuable and they've been working on many things you're working on one sequence so you want to make sure that it goes as smooth as possible believe me there's nothing like a great when you're pitching pitching is again we'll talk about this later there's nothing like a great pitch to a director that works out really well nothing like that so let's get rid there's a cauldron in the foreground let's get rid of this leg here again I've had one on a couple layers so I use a lot of layers when I work and then I'll just delete what I don't need let's zero in on that face again okay so we have I'm going to keep this one a little bit yeah sometimes when you're drawing here you know you're kind of I have an undo button in my hotkeys up here cuz when you're drawing really quickly sometimes you want to you know your lines get away on you you want to be able to get rid of them really really quickly sometimes you have to find that that pose that attitude so I'll go in there and get rid of that most of that face and get these layers back up and and there you have it so there you head you have another silhouetted pose this could be back that's the back there so then he swings his arm around we can see that now the wet what I've done in here is I've drawn this background at a large file and I've taken chunks of it I've I've taken this frame here in that long pan that we looked at earlier which I will show you this one right here is I've taken snippets of that okay and I've almost like cut them out of taking this section because this section is part of the longer pan and then you can see as we pan along here into this file right over there it starts to move okay so it's the same background the same cauldron it's just copied over to each frame okay so nothing jiggles nothing but what's the only thing moving the only thing you want moving in the shot is the character acting you don't want to have this pot here even though it's the same it's exactly the same pot in every panel we don't want it moving around because it's distracting the only thing we want moving here is this night so basically that's what I'm doing here so let me go back in there and get rid of this when you have all of your layers like this it's another reason why you delete them the ones you're not using is because it's confusing sometimes you don't know where you're searching for these layers and you know you know I like to work fast time is money I like to get my drawings out on the page so to speak quickly before I lose the intensity in the motion of what I want to do so I tend to draw quicker than most people and that's why sometimes I have to go back in there a lot of times and do what I'm doing now which isn't a big deal now up phases and stuff like that because then I get but at least I have the essence of what I want to do of the character acting and performing down hotkey down there there we go it's all rough and loose yeah okay good get that up there and that's kind of my process so you see you know I started to get so you can see the all that all of the anatomies there we have the chest plate the the legs proportions are there and I silhouetted pose go into the next one same kind of thing get rid of these layers there's been times when you get you like in storyboarding you will you do your own sequences but later on in the production you might get somebody else see somebody else's sequence that you'll have to do fixes on or revisions to and then you'll see sometimes there's so many layers that people leave on and to me it's frustrating and I like to delete them not just for myself and for the to compress a file size and keep it lighter and easier to work with but also for somebody down the road who's gonna take it over take the scene over it's hard to find things and and further into the production you go the quicker they want things so you might want to keep that in mind for the next person down the road it's a little considerate I've had these where there's been 200 layers on them the file sizes have been 50 megabytes and there's two live actually live layers on it and I'm like well Wow you know so I have to spend my time doing it not the end of the world but it's nice to you know to be considerate of people we're all a team working together so let's do this guy his attitude so what I do is I go up and I'll I mean I'm not gonna go do the other drawings but that's the idea you get you you you tighten up where you need to tighten up keep it cleared not sloppy okay nothing's sloppy here it's loose but very clear because I'm using those silhouettes to me just fix that I am just one bit okay so there we go so then I'll go in close everything and make sure it's saved all apply to all save just I always save because many times you if you leave your desk or something like that and you need files open you're not sure if you've saved them and I always save all anyway and if it's something I've I've saved that doesn't need to be saved in my file and I don't need it I'll just delete it but I'd rather save everything to be honest be on the safe side so this is what that would look like and you know again we can tighten all these back up but he hears this so that's that's a horizontal pan it's very simple very clear but it links one idea to the next just like we saw in that tempo sequence earlier we get closer in on the character again you tied it you tighten this drawing up here clean it up the face so we can see that the expression a little clearer and then we move around the rock the rock is great because what that does is we hear we hear the sound effect of the other character coming but we don't know what we know it's a horse but we're not quite sure what it is it could be a horse that's gotten away you know but that rock kind of hides the reveal of it until we absolutely need to and I positioned the character in this panel here so that we don't because technically you'd see that horse in behind the character but I've positioned him in such a way that we don't quite see it yet and now as he moves further into the z-depth here you start to see that it's a guy coming over the horizon and the horse so what I like about this kind of a pan and the way I've tried to set it up is I've tried to set up the technical part of the horizontal pan camera movement to link two ideas together but what I really tried to do here is I've tried to set up you know of something happening in advance so we we hear the sound before we actually see what's going on and I think that's this is a really good reveal I think of another new character coming into the shot and old and the pan helps link these two ideas to so the audience is discovering this guy on a horse which is a second idea along with him so it's always nice to keep your audience discovering things with the character sometimes you can do it in advance you know when Alfred Hitchcock for example his example that that he uses in his movies the audience can know ahead of time that there's a bomb under the table but the characters don't so that really draws out attention for a 15 you know minutes 10 15 minutes in a movie or you could have two characters sitting at a table bang the bomb explodes the audience nobody knew ahead of time that's just a few seconds of tension and terror but it adds a lot of impact so in something like the assistants and the bomb exploding but this is the audience discovering this antagonistic character coming at this guy this night at the same time here so these kind of horizontally the kind of camera movements are good for doing that linking the two ideas and help discovering you know the help discovering the action the same time the character is but does a story but you could probably flesh this out a little bit more by adding a couple more poses maybe another panel in here but this would give this would suffice for a director being able to tell what's going on in this shot maybe they go off and fight and get into this great battle so that's an example of a horizontal pan so now I want to talk about a still a pan because we're still in the pan world but I'd like to talk about the vertical pan the last one we covered was the horizontal pan moving the camera horizontally across the plane and discovering the action so I think we could still do the same thing here and I've kind of roughed out a little thumbnail underneath that but I can draw you through the process right here as we're going along so it's the same kind of a process I will get it a little layer I'll sometimes I do a couple of roughs but that's just I've already drawn it ahead of time here but I'll just show you walk you through what I've done I get my frame going first so this is roughly in the thumbnail path this is good enough to show the directors in your first pitch I will draw out first of all I'll sit down and think about the idea it's either scripted or it isn't but the plan here would be to reveal an army across the field with with this night seeing it and we're gonna see it for the first time but we're gonna use the night to reveal it I'll show you that so basically I'm gonna rough out the layout of it okay so we have this in the background here and we have these this army it's often the distance but remember this is one shot of a longer story so even though those this little army in the background looks like it's just a bunch of little dots on a hill over there we've set this up I'm sure in a story with previous shots or we'll see later on in more shots we'll cut closer to reveal that's the army up close so don't worry about this kind of a thing because it gives you scale sometimes you can undo button here we've got you know the sky in the background horizontal we draw this grid this is something I want to talk about here we draw the grid on the ground to ground the characters on a plane so when I'm storyboarding I come from a layout background as well as an animation background so I'm lucky enough to have the skill set up both and I really love doing the layout drawings I love getting that z-depth that sense of depth so what I always think of this is a good advice I got years ago is think of you drawing inside a box okay the camera is inside this box looking through one of the walls and you've got these four planes you have your ground plane you have your bar plane okay even if it's a sky it still still pays off to draw that plane for yourself so you know that you've got these these imaginary walls okay now what you can do with that is if you want to just rough out a character's here you can really ground them like they're standing on real ground and it gives you a nice solid layout let's say that's that's an invisible ground plane back there you want to draw the horizon you want to draw a character standing up there too and and down the hill I always draw planes on everything for myself even on that hill back there if there's a hill in the foreground I'll just do that here to define the shape of it and the volume okay and it really helps with your character's standing on these things okay gives you a big sense of a great sense of depth so what I do is I'll imagine that my camera is shooting inside this box with walls ground and a ceiling but even if it's sky is still the ceiling so I always say to a lot of people you know draw that imaginary plane this wouldn't show up in the in the this wouldn't show up in the final storyboards you can just make sure that it's not doesn't take away from what is important in the scene but there you go you can see how the depth is already moving in and it really it really what this does you won't see these ground planes or our sky planes or wall planes in the final render of the film but it really shows layout and all the departments down the road how solidly and where the camera is and how solidly you can that you're thinking of this camera angle it's very clear where the camera anchor the camera is and where it's going to be so when you're clicking through your storyboards if there's no question as to where the cameras place which direction it's looking and up down or around so even if you're drawing something like this like I'm just gonna do a little thumbnail on the side here if it's a character standing in perspective so it helps a lot of times to draw your your grid in the background like that if it's a wall so you can see definitely that's an upshot it helps define it and then you might go in there with another layer and that your ceiling and your wall and then if you want to draw a picture a lamp right there on a table get rid of that plane and there you have it you have your maybe I just gray lower the opacity but there you have your background your angle is it's so clear like I'm not a note 12 lines maybe less you've defined that plane and if it's if it's completely sky you could do something like like this where I'll do this sometimes they're definitely we know that's an op shop and I'll draw my clouds through there maybe tops of hills back there I'd get rid of that I have lower the opacity a bit so the background recedes a little bit away and then maybe a tree back there a couple of trees and already you've seen that this this plane that I've put on there helps define the angle it's making me think that way in a layout sans define the angle so it's really helpful to draw these planes the grids that's really a helpful thing so I will probably get rid of this plane for now but it's there I'm just showing you that and I'll rough out the character same night we used before rough hands you know the pose like that the sword because what I'm doing here is I'm using the sword he's ready he ready to fight maybe when that last pan we saw that was one night maybe a whole bunch of knights came over the horizon later on so basically this is the rough of him he's ready to fight now drawn that sword up like that because if you look how that sword helps frame that whole army in the background you can see how that frames right now what's going to happen here when the final storyboards are done and I'll show you that in a minute is I'm gonna choose a framing and to start with okay this is what I'm thinking so we start there and then I'm probably I may use another color a red and then just for my first frame and then a green just to give myself okay this is the range I want the camera to be in don't I don't want that up there that part don't want any of that you don't want any of that down there so this is the range right here that I want to shoot this in and sometimes I keep playing with that I look at it you see how I've kind of brought it in a little more I'm playing with it I'm getting the perfect framing that will work for what I want I keep playing with it until okay I've got something like that so that's basically what my shots gonna look like like this draw it up drew out my I drew up my frame did my ground planes have my care put my character in the foreground and this character is going to be in the foreground so what I will do probably something like this we get rid of the camera work there that was just for my own sake I wouldn't I never pitch that to the director I would never have that messy green so this would be and this thumbnail is good enough to be able to to show the director he or she would know exactly what's going on here I could I could just show this and define the camera so we'll go back in there I can just show this and define the camera like this and they'll know what I'm thinking pan that's my thumbnail okay so my thumb though will go through my whole process of making a whole little short and thumbnails later on but I start out with a thumbnail always on my storyboards I never jumped to full full-on boards because you can't wrap yourself working on an individual panel what I like to do is give myself freedom to these through these small little drawings and explore ideas different stagings different acting it allows me to get the sequence down really quickly so I can see if it's going to work and then sometimes you look look at the script you read it and you go that idea is not not working so well maybe I should go back to the director and talk about this idea maybe we can cut this part out maybe we can start this part of the sequence a little later so I will define this camera move and that's basically how I will do my thumb for this vertical pan so it's a vertical pan based on this character seeing an army come over you're probably thinking okay how does that translate into a final storyboard oK we've got the idea down now how am I gonna make that a nifty cool camera move well I'm gonna show you that next ok so now we're going to flesh out that vertical pan that we drew earlier so I'm going to show you again I went ahead and drawn it so you can see the elements that I'm using I'm using on one layer my character of course the knight that we use he's in the foreground so now you can see that that opening shot if we go back to that thumbnail which we can see right here it looks like he's not covering that background but what this is showing you is the whole layout of it it's the camera ends up in a down shot a slight down shot but you will see how I've constructed this I've just laid this out so the director knows we're gonna be panning from behind this character up so what that means though is the cameras gonna change perspective you're going you're not going to see the horizon or what's behind it because as a story point I want to save the reveal so the audience thinks ok what's he up against and as he moves down and the camera moves starts you'll be able to see that so that thumbnail here was just for the logistics of the shot the layout the ground plane and what the elements that are in there but the director will know when you pitch this you explain it what you want there so we will start off I have all the elements made so now we start off with the character the foreground of course the background what I like to do with that background you can see how everything is kind of muddy it's clear but it's muddy together so one of the first thing I'll do is I'll take that background and I'll adjust the opacity of it down to about 45% and already you can start to see this depth I'll save that out I'm going to reproduce that group i'll group these layers in groups i'm reproducing that so i'm doubling up on it so now what i'm going to do is what happens in this camera move is the character moves down in the foreground and the background starts to move up and it appears that the camera is raising up when we do storyboards we kind of do optical illusions of what the camera is actually going to be doing doing but it makes it it's effective and it simulates the camera move it's not exactly but it gives you so what it gives you the idea of the camera move so what I'm going to do is move him down okay get rid of that that layer of him okay I'm gonna get rid of the duplicate first one get that background back up and I'm gonna slowly move that up okay so now I'm gonna save this as a new file okay gotta be careful I don't overwrite files done that before okay so now I can show you what this will look like was just going to start it's not the completed camera movie yet but we're just starting out and I will show you how it's gonna start to move okay so we have that frame the first frame that we started out with and now we can see that he's moving down and the background is starting to move up and I'm gonna keep moving him down and moving the background up so we'll reveal what he sees and it'll appear that the camera has actually come from behind him and up and over top of him and that was the that was the idea and laying out this thumbnail that was that was the idea of that okay so I'm just gonna keep working with this I'm gonna duplicate this whole group again okay I'm gonna keep that other group back on back live and I'm gonna take the new group again the character I'm gonna move him keep moving him down okay I'm gonna take the background and I'm gonna move it up now if you see how I've moved the character down here yeah I've moved the character down in larger increments then I have the background because something in the foreground will move quicker in a camera move than something in the background its depth okay something farther away hardly moves as a matter of fact if their horizons far enough away you won't see it move at all just the character in the foreground will move this creates a really nice illusion of depth he's so close so he's gonna move a little quicker at a quicker speed and you'll see that when I'm finished this so Willem visit at first layer we won't get rid of it we'll just in a bit invisible so we won't see it now we're gonna save this one back out to a new file and I'm just going to keep doing this until we get what we want here okay again we're moving him at larger increments in the background okay we'll save that one second here make sure I save it okay a new file yeah okay and again I'm gonna I'm gonna save my file ahead of time so I don't something we're always working on a brand new file what I do is I'll have my original file normally I'll go in and make my new file so I can work with that because sometimes what I've done is I've worked on the original file I'll change it and all sudden it's not there it's change from the original and I love forget to duplicate the panel so always make a new file to work from first we'll go over all of that later on again we're gonna duplicate that I'm gonna move him down okay that background up and then save that and then make my new file you can get into a really fast rhythm here when you start to do this I sometimes work at Lightspeed when I'm doing this and I could do this in like 30 seconds I'm really when I'm really into the groove this is stuff you put the headphones on you listened to Metallica and you just cranked it or whatever Hanks know if you like Hank snow this is that so you can start you could start to see now how this army and the vet in the horizon is starting to be revealed as we're moving him down and I'll show you some other cool tricks to to make this really awesome so this is gonna be fun to finish this off okay Jay you're gonna you end up with with a lot of files here but it's worth it I like to flesh my shots out enough with enough poses and enough camera poses animation camera poses and an animated character poses to sell the idea because if you don't if you if you have the idea in your head and you don't do it right it it just it just doesn't look very good it's kind of half-baked the idea and they may know what you're getting at but it's nice to be able to look at this and pitch it to the directors and it goes so smooth and look beautiful and be proud of it there's nothing like storyboarding now we can see that army starting to be revealed okay so you can already see we're starting to to see that to see that army revealed in the background now let's have let's have a look at that I've saved all of these files out let's see how this camera move works okay so now we've we've fleshed it out and this is what the camera move will look like you can see that the character the camera is coming up and over the character to reveal the Army in the background now you could take this as far as you want you could bring that character right out of the shot at the bottom you could you could leave them here you know you could do you can you could even stop right there if you need to but I always like to to give enough room here for the editor to move around and stop it where they want to stop it so basically we're revealing a story point this is what he's up against an army in the background really rough loose but it gets the idea across the next panel probably you'd cut into the army I mean that's that's the logical sense I mean if you cut you could cut back to him and see his reaction or any any charges if you want to save there it depends what kind of the story is you want to save reveals or whatever but this is this is our establishing shot of what we're gonna reveal so that's a vertical pan now I'll go in there and do a couple of cool things to it as well let's let's play around with this this idea here just to show you what I do open up these files again all of them at once okay so I went back into my first file and what I'll do is I'll add some tone a darker tone on the character in the foreground okay I'll use my lasso tool cut that out just his outline bucket fill bang there's is your your tone of the character of the foreground you'll draw your on them there that's so that's our night now to make this really cool what I'm gonna do to give it even more depth is I'm gonna add a Gaussian blur to it go up to your filters Gaussian and I'll play around with now that's too much I'll play around with the level of blur so here I might want to since he's so close I might want to give him probably a 6 blur get blurred him the outline then I'll go in the tone and I have a hot key here they'll blurred that as well okay and I'll save that out is it saving going to the next one flood fill same thing now you don't have to do this one at a time another way to do it would be to since the character hasn't moved it's the same pose he's in he's just he's just moving down is you do that you flood fill the tone oops wrong tone your flood fill the tone in the initial drawing and just try to just copy that layer over and just keep moving it down it's much quicker but I didn't do that because I wanted you to see the whole process of how I do this and I'll go back in with my hotkey and I'll blur and then blur and there save that out so then you'll see how how cool this looks at the end here get that lasso let's do that I think in my recollection one of my colleagues I've worked with a while ago I saw this action for flood filling automatically now I've never used it but I'd like to get a hold of it because if it's something that you dead will identify think you have to close your lines in the drawing but I think it automatically will flood fill any tone you want and if I could ever find that out or find that that action and use it I would use it so I'm gonna explore that for myself keep our hotkeys and then I mean you can be as accurate as you need to be with this it doesn't have to be perfect because you're just you know I'll juice I'll do something like this where I'll lasso it but then I'll go in there and just erase a couple of little over things but the drawing isn't 100% but it's clear what it is but the the you have to have the flood-fill match you don't want it to come outside the lines or anything like that almost there okay so we'll close all these drawings out apply to all we want to save them save it all just in case and if you don't need it you can always delete it because you never want to make the mistake of deleting something that you needed it happens I've done that before everybody's done that and and and you learn painfully sometimes so this is what it looks like now we have the blur Gaussian blur in the foreground and we can see we're being slowly revealed this is a vertical pan this is this is what it looks like you see that looks pretty cool and then you'd have the music playing you know you could put some animation on him you could have him move but probably it's just like a really quick and then we'll cut in to these characters the flags could be flying animating on their on their spears in the background so the baby wind so there we go so we go from this planning out this vertical pan in the layout the final camera move will be this and that is a vertical pan

Channel: The Art of Aaron Blaise

Views: 146,137

Rating: 4.9732099 out of 5

Keywords: The Arts, Animation, Art, Illustration, storyboard

Id: 8HpHH5xQqp4

Length: 60min 58sec (3658 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018