Introduction to Storyboarding for Animation

1. Class intro: Hello everyone. My name is Re Ginger, I'm Collin. I'm a feature story artists currently working at Netflix Animation Studios. This introductory course on storyboarding will focus on the fundamentals of storyboarding as a form of visual communication and animation. The course will cover basic concepts of camera editing, drawing, and how it all pertains to storyboarding. This class is for those of you who are absolute beginners, the storyboarding. So you don't need to worry about expensive software or hardware is simple. Pen and paper will work totally fine. But if you do have software and hardware, that's okay as well. You should take this class if you don't have a lot of time on your hands, but you still want to get really important information from somebody who is working in the industry. This class, you will be given small assignments that will target the basic skills you would need to have in order to move on to the Advanced Study of storyboarding. I put this class together with the hopes of giving you as much information as I can possible. And I'm super excited for you to experience it. So let's get started. 2. 1 Introduction to Storyboarding: Okay everyone, welcome again to Introduction to storyboarding with me ridge and Jerome Cohen. And I'm so happy that you guys are taking this class. And I hope that you will learn from this class and it will improve your storyboard and skills. This is a really basic introduction to everything storyboarding. So if you are more advanced, I would recommend that you skip this, this class and move on to the other classes. This is just me giving you a quick introduction to what storyboarding is. So let's get into that right now. We're going to talk about the, what, the why, the how, the where, and the who of storyboarding, right? So what is storyboarding for those who know into this may have a slight idea what it is for those who may not even know what it is, but it just curious about storyboarding. Basically, storyboarding is a part of the production process and create television shows, movies, games, things, storytelling, visual storyteller and productions. What it is is basically the planning, using cinematic language to tell her story and to help the director or the storytellers to prevision what they think the movie would be like. It's also a way of visualizing scripts. And so the artists, kids see and the directors could see how their vision is coming along. What changes could be made to help save time and save money in the production process. So how to create storyboards? So basically, all you need for this class is either, you could either go traditional or digital. It doesn't matter. You could use a pen or pencil and a piece of paper, pretty much it, or sketchbook, right? If you go in digital, you may need digital drawing software. We'd have Photoshop, or European, or any of those softwares, right? You can also use a free software called storyboard, which I recommend because it's a really good developing software that's absolutely free and it's only me. And for storyboarding, that's the stuff you can use to create storyboards. So why create storyboards? And I kinda went over this and the previous one, like what our storyboards, why we create storyboard is to save time, save money, and to help prevision your story is pretty much storyboards are such a time saver and they help with the production and it filled so you don't waste time. You don't get stressed though too much. Because imagine if you are creating a film and you don't know what the film is about and you just go in and you start making it. And you almost finished and then you decide, you know what, this whole thing not working. But if you had did it and storyboards, you would have seen the problems with the story and you got to fix it without spending so much time and so much money on the production. Who create storyboards to anybody create storyboards to special people, create storyboards. Well, yes, people who create storyboards are called storyboard add. Now, to be a storyboard artist, you're going to need a specific set of skills. And those skills we're going to talk about in the future classes. These are the skills you're going to learn. You're going to be, you're going to have to be a good sketch out this. You're going to have to be a good storyteller, going to have to be a good writer, a good reader, a good analyse, analysis person. And you're gonna, you're gonna need a lot of skills to be a storyboard artist. You're going to have to be a director as well. So moving on, let's talk about some storyboard artist. And I'm going to show you guys some of the storyboard artist I look up to for inspiration. And they have been working in industry for so long and they've worked on amazing productions. We're going to start with Brenda Chapman, because Brenda Chapman is one of the lead female storytellers in the industry right now. And I was lucky enough to meet her at a presentation that she made about working in there in the industry. And at that time I didn't know who she was. And when I saw a presentation about who can own brief and Prince of Egypt, I was so amazed by the work that she did. And I was so mesmerized and I really had to find out more about her. And then I read so much more about her and realize that she's been working in industry. We longtime back and Lion King days back in the rescuers don't under this at Disney. And I would totally recommend that if you haven't heard about brand and Chapman, that you check out her work. Another person that you should check out is Chris Sanders. His most famous work. I think that it would be Leila one stitch, but he's also worked with Disney and other productions like Moulin and The Lion King. And you can see here, these are some of his storyboards. He has a really unique sketching style and his, his whole look and how he, how he draws is really unique and I totally, totally recommend that you check him out. Another grid storyboard artist is Dean day bullet. Bullies, probably. That name, but he's amazing. I discovered him while I was doing some research on Milan and the production out of Milan. And I was so amazed by the storyboards. It was so well crafted so they will fluids so well. And, and his, his way of his draftsmanship was so amazing. These are just some of his boards I was able to pull off for my book. I have. And if you haven't heard of Dean, I totally recommend that you check them out. I recommend that you check out all these guys and mastered some of some of you. The only way you probably don't know about hire me as Zaki is if you are like really, really young and you have no idea about a vote, vote animation or anything. Because high muzak, It's well-known through out the world as one of the greatest storytellers, greatest directors even consider buying a lot of people. He worked on printers morning, okay, Spirited Away. And so much more amazing films. He's actually one of my favorite directors and one of my favorite storyboard artist. Now the unique thing about Jaime and Zackie storyboards is that he actually doesn't work from a script. He works organically with the story and he just bought and edits. And he feels the story grow and change. And he, he, unlike Disney, where they work from a script and you have multiple artists working together as a team which is so effective. Miyazaki actually has the hole. He envisions the whole film and as mine and then portal the entire movie. And sometimes he doesn't even finish storyboard and remove it before the production starts. Production starts and sometimes he doesn't even know how the movie would end. So if for some strange reason you haven't seen any of Miyazaki films and that you need to you need to go and watch his films. You need to check audit storyboards and do some research on them. So that brings me to the booths assignment for you guys. I know this, this introductory class is really, really short. I just want you guys to actually go and do some research on this list of storyboard artists that I've laid out here. There are so many great storyboard artist working in the industry now. And every time I see they work, I always get inspired to try and better, to try and do better to try and be a better storyboard artist that's buried a better storyteller. I always recommend that you look at a lot of artists are variety of artists. No matter, no matter if you don't like the stories they tell, if you do like the stories they tell and analyze their work and antique inspiration and learn from them. Gay guys, that was the first class from introduction to storyboard, storyboarding with me. And I hope that you move on to the next class and excited for the next class. 3. 2 How to draw storyboards: All right guys, welcome to lesson two of storyboarding with me, Raj. This lesson, we're going to talk about how to draw for storyboards are storyboarding. And there is a certain way that you need to know how to draw a certain mindset that you need to have on a drawing. And we're going to go over my accent and go over these techniques in this lesson. So let's get right to it. So here we have, let's see, we are gonna do some storyboards for a live action or animated. Sure, we have these three characters here. Now, when you're drawing storyboards, you need to be able to draw really fast and you need to meet deadlines. And you need to, a lot of the times you will need to make a lot of changes because the direct doesn't like the sequence and he wants you to report it or for some other reason. So that is why when you're doing storyboards, you're not going to do your illustrations or sketches with a lot of detailed. So there's a lot of short hand sketching, storyboarding. And one-year when you're drawing a character, or do you try to do is you try to get the least amount of lines to represent that character. And you still need to be able to, as someone sees the sketch, they still need to know which character that sketch it. So I'm gonna do some quick rough sketches of these three people here. And I want to show you how I approach it. So for the girl, I'm just going to draw the samples and I'm going to draw a stick figure guy, right, to represent. And then I'm just going to add the features that I think make us stand out as who she is in that picture. I'm just going to add it here and that's pretty much it for her. This is how I would draw her in a storyboard. For this guy over here. When I'm drawing them, I'm going to draw the same quick sketch, stick figure. And, but what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add glasses and his bowl cut hair style to show you that you know that this is him. For the last guy, he's much older. So what I'm gonna do and he has a hot so I'm gonna make sure I add these elements. So when I'm doing boards or when somebody watches the board, they know that this is a shorthand of this character storyboard and you don't need to draw really, really fancy. You don't need to draw a really detailed stuff like when you just start and storyboard and you get exposed to it, it gets, it's a bit hard because you'll want you bought. So look a bit pretty unimpressive. As you get more and more experience, you realize that the illustrations just need to be clear and simple to communicate the story. So let's move on to some more examples. Now. Let's have this girl right here. Let's say she was the main character in your story right? Now when we look at her costume, we're seeing a lot of detail. I know it's a, it's an Indian style dress. So when we look at her, I would look at it and try to see what is the important elements for character and the things that I can leave out that totally unnecessary and communicate and historian communicate and her character. I made two examples here to show you guys how, how simple it can be. And I did one that's a bit that I went a bit overboard and the detail that would show you that it's a bit unnecessary to go this detail. So that's the one in the middle of idea. And the last one too far, right? This is a really, really, really rough, rough, rough sketch of how I would draw her a storyboard. Now when I am boarding, all I actually need is to know who this character is and having the two breads and her hair is just enough for me to know and to communicate to my director or my storyboard team that this is the character and that will be hurting the scene. So when they look for the character in the scene, they were just look for a girl with two braids. And let's say, let's say you have two characters. In this scene. What you would do is you would just add another element to the quick sketch that would show, that would differentiate the characters. So the one in the middle is an example of what you will not to do and try not to go this detail because you will waste a lot of time. So it's not just characters that you need to draw shorthand and communicate simply. It's also your environments and everything that is in this storyboard. So right now here we have example of a castle, right? So let's say in your story or in your script, there has to be a castle. And this is the design of the car so that maybe the design team passed on to, you know, you have to draw it in your storyboard. Now I did at another example here that shows that castle that's a bit too detail, a bit too complicated for storyboards. It may be good enough for maybe clean up, but not when you're doing initial rough. So I'm gonna go super simple. And this is actually how I would do maybe a first-pass on a storyboard, just make it super clear, super simple. All the team needs to know. How the director needs to know is that this is the castle. This is what's important in the castle and in the area. If it's just an establishing shot, this is pretty much all you need to show. Very, very simple. This image is communicates that, Hey, this is a castle and it's surrounded by water, and this is where the events of the scene going to take. Moving on. Now, we have another example of some kittens here. An example again of even though this is just a quick sketch I made of these kittens. Now, in the context of storyboarding, this is a bit still too much like, yes, I know like this quick sketch here, I did it. There's very few detail. It's still a bit too much detail and you could simplify it more. And this is how simple you could actually go like some circles and he just showed the eyes. You don't even have to draw all the food and stuff that you're seeing on the cat. Now, unless each cut is a particular character in a film and you need to put a specific food pattern on the character to signify which cut is which character, then you probably would draw that in. But if, let's say it has some random cuts, it all really need to draw that much detail. Alright, the next thing that you need to be aware of when drawing for storyboards is being able to understand gesture. And knowing that gesture is more important than drawing correct anatomy for a character. Now, for those of you who may not know gesture, gesture is basically drawing the essence or during the action of a character with all focusing on individual muscles of a figure. So in this example where we have here a drawing of the anatomy of a human being. And then we have basically the gesture of the samples of the same man knowing the anatomy version, we see that it's drawn with all the intricacies of the muscles and we draw the abs and chess and everything. Now for storyboards, as again, because you're on a deadline and you need to get your ideas across pretty fast. You don't have time to draw every muscle or draw everything anatomically correct. So what you would do is just focus on the gesture of the character because he gesture would communicate the action of the character and be more clear. And your directorial audience who's ever watching these storyboards will be able to understand what you're trying to see. And they don't need the muscles to be there for the idea to come across. So let's say for example, disjoint, right? It's a pretty good drawing. It draws, it, it, it has all the muscles is well proportioned and everything and the character is stretching out. We have the idea of what the character is doing. But with storyboards now, disjoin as well refined and storyboard. You don't have time to draw everything so well refined, everything so accurate on maybe a first pass is second bus. And we would gesture drawing, it's usually really, really quick, really, really loose. You focus on the action. You don't focus on, like, you know, everything being anatomically correct. So like in this drawing, you can see that everything is much more loose and still communicates the same thing that the character is doing any previous drawing. Now let's look at this example. Now. Another thing that you need to know about anatomy is that sometimes when you draw things really accurate to life, it tends to come out really stiff and a bit lifeless. When recreated in Detroit. When you're doing a gesture, gesture adds more life and you see a lot more life in the drawing as compared to the one that has more accurate to life because it's gestures usually push, it's usually exaggerated. So you get, you're able to push the idea even more and to cheat a little bit in terms of realism and still communicate your idea THE director. So now I wanted to show you guys an example of some storyboards done by some Pixar storyboard artist. I couldn't find his credit, so I know who it is. I would love to know his name because I really love these boards. These are some storyboards from the movie Coco. And if you look at them, you could see how loose and gestural these drawings, they don't try to be super, super accurate to life. Because if you've seen this movie that you knew that these characters, they're mainly bonds and the skeletal bones. But this artist, he doesn't draw every bone and the ribs. He doesn't draw every bone. Hands, everything doesn't have to be accurate. You just add enough that you know these characters are skeleton. And you don't really need to add every single detail. So these are really, really nice bought. These boats are actually on YouTube. You can actually just type in cocoa storyboards, deleted scenes, and you will get to see these boats and action. They're really, really good. You should check them out. Now the last thing that we're going to look at and with understanding drawings for storyboard is having a clear silhouette with your drawings. Now, many of you have come across this and we're just going to go over it again. But let's look at an example, a quick example, and we will just go for it really fast again. So we have a two drawings of the same woman and she's holding a spear. Now the one on the right is the better way of drawing her. Because if we block the Detroit and out, you will still be able to know and to see what the woman is doing clearly. Now with the drawing on the right, when we block it all week, get confused at what is really happening. We don't really know where the placement of this space. We can't really tell what's really going on for sure. But compared to the one with the red, we could clearly see that she's holding a spear to the left, stretched out. And we know what's going on. With silhouette. We tried to keep this silhouette really, really clear. Here are some more examples. We can tell what these characters are clearly doing. This all in her hair, wasn't a sword up, holding a gun. We know what these characters are doing. So what storyboards we tried to keep everything clear. So what we're gonna do now is I'm going to show you guys an exercise that you're going to do for your assignment, which will help you to build, or are they getting the habit of drawing for storyboards? It's actually an assignment that I see, Well, when I was learning storyboards that I saw that a lot of storyboard artist did, maybe as a warm-up exercise or exercise they used to study film. This exit, which will help you to build, or are they getting the habit of drawing for storyboards? It's actually an assignment that I see when I was learning storyboards that I saw that storyboard artist did maybe as a warm up exercise or exercise they use to study film. This exercise, I realized actually helps you to draw in shorthand. So what the exercise actually is is you would take a movie or TV show or any, any kind of visual medium or an issue or anything. And you would take a scene. And then as the scene plays out, you try and draw these scenes as they play out with old pause in the arm, the movie or the TV show. So this would force you to draw the most important elements as fast as possible. So in this, in this example, I have on screen here, I actually decided to do the incredible where the family was sitting at the table. And basically what I'm doing here is I drew out some boxes For the scenes. I drew this out before I started, so I won't be wasting time drawing the box as well I've seen is going on. And then I play the scene. And I would try to draw the scene as fast as possible, capture and most important elements of composition, which characters were on the scene, the character placement and everything like that. And it will force you to see what is important and to forget the details, to forget all the fancy shading, to forget things that don't really, that don't really add to the story or adjust like background elements that are not important at the time. So this is going to be one of your assignments. What I want you to do is to find a scene and maybe your favorite movie or a favorite TV show, favorite animated show. And take a scene, draw out the storyboard boxes, play the scene. And then wildly seen is going on. Draw. Try and draw is seen as fast as possible, even if it's just really rough, even if only you get understand your sketches, that's okay. The point is that you try and try and get new, new mindset of drawing a nice shorthand for storyboard. So there's another time, another assignment which is similar to this one, but a bit more relaxed, right? So what you would do is take the same thing or you can take another scene. But what I want you to do is pause the first frame of every scene and then take some time and draw the important elements in the scene. And then play the scene. Then add the ending of that scene, pause it, and draw, draw the ending of that scene. So this will show you is actually more of a scene study kind of exercise. But what I want to show you is that when you have more time to draw a scene, you would see that compare to the previous assignment and see how much detail you added while you had more time and the amount of detail he had when he didn't had more time. And see, compare the elements that you added in all the elements that you did not even compared to the first assignment. See what you drew in that was more important, what wasn't important compared to first pass, right? So guys, make sure and do this assignment because it will really help you with your speed in a sketch and it will help you and having the right mindset for storyboarding and help you to see beyond the detail, but to see what important to this story on what you need to focus on. So I hope you do it and I hope you come back for the next class. So because I can't wait to show you guys what we haven't stored. So I hope you enjoyed this class and I see you in the next one. 4. 3 The shots : Okay everyone, welcome to lesson three of storyboarding with me, garage. In lesson three, we're going to talk about visual vocabulary. And the shot switches the same thing. So for those of you who may not know, storyboarding involves understanding the art of the cinematic language. Now there's a certain language you need to know. Visual language when you doing storyboards, you can just go draw and scenes, happy, go lucky. There are certain rules. You need to know. When you know those rules eventually you can break those rules. Now before we get into the shot, I just wanted to do a quick explanation of aspect ratio. Now what aspect ratio is basically is, I've shown, many of you have seen movies and you've seen when you look at the screen, sometimes you've seen movies with the black bars on the top and the bottom. And then sometimes you might see a movie with it fills the whole screen. And then sometimes you might look at a really old movie and it might be in a box type shape. Well, this is basically aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is basically the relation of the screen's width to its height. So here's a pretty rough diagram of some aspect ratios. So the fortunate aspect ratio is basically the really old aspect ratio that used to be on televisions where you would have a TV that's really just a square. Now this was the aspect ratio that film was shot for those televisions. And as time went on, the aspect ratio became wider because it was more immersive. And then in film, we have the aspect ratio of 1.1, 0.8521 aspect ratio, which is a wide aspect ratio fulfilled, right? Then television caught up with cinema. And now we have white screen televisions at ratio of 16 tonight. So they are more aspect ratios in-between because of the evolution of cinema and the evolution of film and video. But these are the three main ones you should basically know of. The forgery is the original box aspect ratio. This 16 by nine is usually what you would be storyboarding on for a TV show. And the 1.8521 is what you would probably be used in fulfilled. Now the reason why I'm telling you this is because depending on the production you're working on, you're going to have the acts, either historical, admire joy, you have a story. What aspect ratio is the show or a film going to be? And because it's very important, because It's one of the first things you need to do when you open up your storyboard and software, no matter what it is, you would need to work at the aspect ratio of the show. So if you want to read up more about Aspect Ratio, there's a whole bunch of stuff on the Internet experience the different aspect ratios and history with film and video, et cetera. But let's move on to the shots now. First, we're going to talk about the wide shot. Wide shot. A lot of you have seen movies, like most movies, the opening scene is a wide shot. Wide shot. Wide shot usually establishes the environment or the location where the story is going to take place. Let's say in this shot I out or just a random building. And this is the first shot. I wanted, I wanted to tell my audience that this is where the scene or the story of this scene is going to take place. I want to tell them, I want to communicate to them that this is where the story is going to take place. Now, sometimes wide shots and always use to open a scene. Sometimes they may use, We used to end the scene to show, to reveal something, to keep suspense or like to be a revelation to the audience. Sometimes it isn't always use as establishment. The second shot we're going to talk about is the full shot. This is a shot that's used a lot. And what this shot is used for is mainly to show the full body of a character. So the audience knows who this character is, that costume they could get out a full look at them. Have an idea about who this character is. This shot is also used to show. Character in environment. They wanted to shoot the character, the full character in the environment, and how they interact with that environment. Now, this shot we're going to talk about here now is called the cowboy shot. And as you could see, this shot is a bit more closer right above the knees. They call it the cobalt shot because it's usually the guns of the coal boy really hung. And I think I believe I could be wrong. I believe they used to use the shot a lot in Westerns and stuff. So reason why you would want to use this shot is to get a little closer to the character, a little more intimate. We're going to talk about intimacy a little more with the medium close-up shot. Now the medium close-up shot, it usually ends, right? Let's say you were wearing a shirt and you notice should bucket, it usually ends like right there. It'll cover from the chest area right up to the head. Now the medium shot is used more when you have characters are talking to each other and they talk and maybe they're just having a quick conversation. Probably not too serious, probably not too dramatic, just a casual conversation. And now we're going to have even move the camera even closer up to the character. This one is called the choker. It's usually covers head, right to where the joints, the body. This is a shot like, okay, you wanna be a little more intimate, a little more emotional. And I think for me, when I use close close shots, I I tend to use them more and more emotional moments, more like when I want to see the emotion in the actor's face, they knew they really nuanced actin and the actor's face. And as you keep going closer, you get the big head close-up shot this sometimes you wanna be really dramatic. It go really close up and you get even be more dramatic by even go into the extreme close-up, right? So this shot is, the extreme close-up is usually cuts off a lot of the characters face. Sometimes you could go even as close as just the eye and just have a shot of the eye and you're not seeing it knows you're not seeing the other. I just have a shot of the eye. Right? And sometimes, as I said before, sometimes you may not use an establishing shot to open a scene, right? And those other circumstances, you may use an extreme close-up to open a scene. And as you move away and reveal more information to the audience, That's the way you could open up a scene as well. So all we're going to talk about now is the over the shoulder shot. So I hope I open up moving too fast for you guys because this is some really basic, basic cinema language. There's a lot, a lot of language of cinema. And these are the really, really basic ones that you need to understand. The over the shoulder shot is a shot where let's say you have two characters talking or you want to do is have the, you want to draw the illusion of the camera being over the shoulder of one character or another. As you can see, we have two characters talk in here. And you'd see from the different angles where the camera actually is. It's always behind the other, the other character who isn't talking or who we don't want the audience to really look at at the moment. We're going to talk about this shot more when we talk about the 180 degree rule. But for right now, this is a quick introduction to the over the shoulder. Now, we're going to talk about the two shot. A two shot is basically two characters in a shot. Really, really, really simple. So first example, two characters standing next to each other. And you just make sure that bold characters are in the shot. Because if bold characters, if one character is not in the shot and one character has way more space and they shot, it probably wouldn't be considered a two shot. So this is the first example of a two shot. Move to the right. Second example, characters in a bit more perspective. So we have the camera more on the side of one character rather than the Next. And now we can have another example of a two shot. What we have shut off characters talking. You want to show the two characters token in the same shot. This is an example of a two shot. And even this last example over here, where we have the characters like facing a week looking at something. And I didn't draw what they're looking at, but I just wanted to show you that. Okay, Let's see. These two characters are looking at a spaceship and we have the backs of both of them. This is also a two shot, so it doesn't necessarily have to have their fears, fears, and the camera for it to be at to shut. So now we have let's talk about the tree shut right? Now. The tree shot is, it usually is very straightforward. It's when you have a shot of tree characters all in the same shot. So we have four examples here. The first one is some characters just literally standing up in a line next to each other and we see all three of the characters. This is one type of tree shot. Now, if we move to the other side on the right, we can have a little more dynamic shot here, where we have characters in different sizes. In this shot, we have the largest one being the main focus, and then the second largest being the second focus on the character we're to the back being the least focus. This is also a tree shot and it's a bit more dynamic than the first one. So if we move down back to the left, we have another example of a Trisha. This is just a triangle arrangement of characters having a conversation. Now, this one is a bit more complicated because it also involves, do you want it to rule and talking about shooting characters who are talking and not confusing the audience. We're going to get in depth in that, in the later lessons, as I said before. The last example of a tricky shot yet is a bit more perspective shot where the character is looking off into the distance, but we have the characters are closest to foods. These are all examples of T-Shirts. There are probably way more ways you could organize a tricky shot, but this is some basic examples. This has been a quick introduction of some of the cinematic language that you would need to know when I'm drawing storyboards and maybe broken down a script and having visual ideas in your head so you can tell the story in storyboards. So let's move on to the assignment for this lesson is going to be really simple and really fun. So let's get to that. Okay, for this assignment, we're going to do a bit of a scene analysis. I want you guys to choose a scene from a favorite movie. Watch the scene and break down the shot types that the director use, observed the intercutting between the shots. Take note of the way the director uses the wide shot, the close-up shot, and all the other shots. See if you can identify why the director may have used a close-up shot instead of a wide shot and over the shoulder shot instead of a two shot. Just like before, I want you to draw all the shots for the scene and study them as a whole. This is your assignment for this class. Good luck. 5. 4 Perspective: In this lesson, we're going to talk about basic perspective, which is something everyone is familiar with. But in storyboarding, it appears a lot and you're going to need to know how to handle perspective in order to do a lot of your shots. Now before we get into the different types of perspective, I want you guys to be familiar with the different axes in your composition. So in this diagram we have an x-axis, which is the horizon line. The z-axis, which is going diagonally on the y-axis, which is cool vertically. Know the one-point perspective. We have an x-axis and a z axis. We have the horizon line, which has the vanishing point on it. And then we have the lines that converge, the z axis lines confusion towards the point in the distance. Now one-point perspective is when these lines converge into 1, a lot of you are familiar with that, so we're not going to spend too much time on that two-point perspective. When we have two vanishing points on the same horizon line and we have the lines converge and towards both of them. Now, in two-point perspective, you're going to use the shot a lot for a lot of panning shots when you're drawing, trying to simulate a panning shot, you're going to have to know how to draw two-point perspective grids. Now in two-point perspective is, as it says, you're going to have tree points vanishing and basically have one above vertically. And then you have the two lines on the horizon line. Don't know this two-point perspective. You use this for like say, if you wanted to show a tall building and then you have the streets GO and confusion down on both ends. This is where you will have a lot of two-point perspective. Now, Triple Aim perspective doesn't want to just go up. It could also go from dark if you have an overhead view and get a two-point perspective as well. In this diagram, you can see as though the camera is maybe above the buildings. And then we can see the, the horizon line with the other two points of perspective. Maybe shoot in the streets, go in and distance and the lines converging towards these points in the distance. Now, let's talk about AI Level. I level is something that's really important for you to understand in terms of when you're drawing like a grid, dependent on how the camera is right there. And that's basically what i level. It's the level at which the camera is at. And this is the level at which your audience will be experiencing this story at any diagram over here, you could see like a little guy, he's looking into the camera. And on the right we can see the viewfinder where he is, what he's actually saying. No, I want you guys to take a close look at the z axis lines. I want you to notice how many there are and how close they are. Now this is the relatively close grid lines you're gonna get with somebody who is actually just standing up fully and looking at the camera. Now, as we move forward and we get to this example where we have the subject he's kinda bent over, look into the camera and he's not standing up straight. He's crouching over a bit. Now, as the subject gets lowered, the z, d z axis lines will start to spread apart and become less. Now the eye level line, the horizontal horizon line, sorry, will actually stay in the same place. It will stay in the same place of the interview finder, right in the middle there. Unless you do some major to ten to the camera, it's going to stay the same right? Now as you get even lower, you're going to have less z-axis lines. Now join, Let's see. Axis lines will create the illusion that your camera is getting lower and lower and closer to the ground as we get even lower. And you see, this is the not necessarily the lowest point. You can carry a camera. Sometimes you can even go in a whole. But this is the lowest disputes and could go without actually digging a hole, are going under sea level. You could see the z axis line has lines have become just two lines converging into a point. And the previous drains onDestroy. And you could tell that the vanishing point isn't directly all the lines on convolution directly to the vanishing point. Because as the camera gets lower. The vanishing point won't be as visible because the floor era will become much bigger and you won't be able to see high enough to see the actual vanishing point of the lines right now and the total opposite direction with the eye level. If this subject starts to get higher and higher and higher, you will get more and more z-axis lines because the surface area you're able to see into the distance becomes more and more. So you will get more and more the axis lines. So this will actually create the illusion. While when you draw mod z axis lines that you are higher, high up in the air and you have a larger font. You probably will have to draw more z-axis lines when you're doing like a crane shot or a bird's eye view shot or overhead view Shaft. So this will give you a little idea how to draw the grid lines for the different levels of the camera. So now I want to talk to you a little, a little, a little shortcut called hanging perspective. Now, I'm perspective will help you when you're drawing a lot of people in one scene who basically the same height. So we have the subject here, he's standing up on the ground here, Andy horizon line, the eye level line is close to his feet and cutting his feet of. So if I wanted to draw more people in the scene and I wanted the perspective to be realistic to not break the rules or anything. What I would do is I will draw the simplest and right, but I would draw them in a way that the horizontal line will cut his legs off at the same place that it is cutting the first subjects legs off in the shot. So therefore, I would have to draw them a little smaller, obviously because he is further back, but I would want the horizontal horizon line to cut. And meters where almost below his knees that I would want to to meet the same place as the first person. And even if you tilt the camera up a bit and you have more of a worm's eye view shot. And you're looking at the character where the horizontal lines, like in this example, meet the horizon line, sorry, meets the ankle of the character. And you want to draw more characters in this scene. All we have to do is draw more characters in the scene, but let the horizon line meet them at their ankles, like in this shot here, it's the same thing with close-up shot. If you have a subject and it's a more of a medium close-up shot, like in this example. The horizon line is intersecting them at the neck and you want to draw more people in the scene. You just draw them out a little smaller, but allow the horizon line to intersect the subject at the same area as the first-person. So as you add more people, you intersect the line at the same place. And this is a, this is all good shortcut for you to draw more and more people in the shop would keep it in the rules of perspective. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about drawing grid lines. So we're gonna do another example here to show you how I approached drawing lines. So we have a subject here and we get slightly tell that we are above him maybe, but with all the grid lines, we can't really tell for sure. So in this example, I want to show you that the importance of grid lines, which is showing a viewer which angle we looking at this character, because we can't really tell for sure where the camera is with this character because we have no real sense of the environment. There's no grids to show what this character is. Where's this character and what he's standing on or anything like that. So my initial approach for this card is that I want audience to know that this character is being viewed from above. Maybe it looks like crane shot, right, but it's actually shut. So what I would do to start drawing the grid is that I would draw two z-axis lines. Now, the Firstly axis line, which is the red line, I usually draw that line in line with the subjects shoulder parallel to the subject shoulder. So this red line is actually parallel with the same line or the same direction. His shoulders aren't know. The green line which you see is this line is actually in line parallel the direction of his feet. So you can see the green line close to his left foot is actually parallel. Now, this will help me start drawing my grid for, for the scene, right? So when I fully draw the grid, it's going to look like this. Now, this grid will help the viewer know that, hey, we are looking at this character from above and you're going to need to know how to draw proper grids for your storyboard. So when you're shooting it, maybe a teammate or to an audience, they will know where the camera is and you're going to have to draw your grids in proper perspective. So let's move on to another example we have here. We have another character. We're going to draw the grid above his head. So it's going to be the same principle of drawing the grids for worm's eye view shot. You're going to draw the lines parallel to his shoulder, which is the red one. And then you're going to draw another grid line which is parallel to the direction of his feet. And once you draw these first two lines, you can then fill out the grid parallel to these lines. Now you would have a grid showing the ceiling or the overhead view where people will know that the camera is below doing a worm's eye view shot of this character. Alright, for this assignment, what you're going to do is that you're going to take some screenshots of some scenes from any movie that you want. And you're going to break down the shot and look at the perspective. And you're going to draw the grid lines for the scenes. And we'll code hold the camera angle is used on trying to understand the perspective. So here are some examples of what I want you guys to do exactly is so you'll have seen, so this one is actually from Indiana Jones. Alright, you can pause this scene, what is seen? And then see where the horizon line is. And then draw in the grids and try and put in everything into the composition and try and understand how the grids work and the perspective works and see how the director use his horizon line and where he put it. And, you know, take notice of these things. So do as much of these as possible so that you will understand the perspective and the grid lines and really make observations on the use of them and the angles in which there 6. 5 The 180 rule : All right guys, welcome to lesson five of storyboard. And with me, Raj. In this lesson we're going to talk about the 180 degree rule. I'm sure a lot of you know what this rule is. Many of you probably have an idea and really good at it. I'm going to be really honest. The first time I started storyboarding, I, I kept jumping they want ET line. I kept breaking the rule. I, I couldn't really understand it the first time I started bought in and my boards kinda really suffered firm from it. Every time I got critique from my storyboard mentors, always telling me that I keep jumping the line and then I have to redo the boards because I messed up the whole screen direction for the whole storyboard. And it was less really, really, really, really frustrated. So I think that the one degree rule is a rule that you really need to study and practice a lot and your boards. So let's jump right into it. So what is the one ET rule? Anyways? Why do we use it? Why is it therefore, the 180 degree rule is actually an invisible line between, like it's created between two subjects when they're, when they're having a conversation. Or even not just between two subjects, but between our subject and maybe an object in the room or in the set or whatever. And this diagram here, you can see two people talking, right? So you have one on your right, one on the left, and then you have the camera, which is recording, which is framing and recording their conversation. Now, I drew a little dotted line at the bottom there to show where the 180 degree line is. And then I drew a semicircle. Now that semicircle is actually a representation of a stage in terms of theatre. So let us say the camera is where the audience is sitting in a theater where the seats, and they are looking at these two actors on the stage performance. So that's why I drew a little stage semicircle to represent that. Now, the 180 degree rule is a rule in place so that you won't confuse an audience when you're shooting a film or storyboard. So the rule is basically that the camera is on one side. As you can see. The rule is that you, when you start shooting up conversation, you have a character on one end, like here, and a character on the other. So in this example, here, you see character one is on the left and character two is on the right of the screen. And in order for this to stay the same, the camera needs to stay on this side of the one ET lying right on the diagram above, you see the invisible line. You see the camera is on one side. And because of that character, one is on the left, correct? Two is on the right. Now, if we break this rule when we're shooting the characters talking or we broke this rule I was storyboarding will get something like this where we put the camera on the opposite end of the characters. So now when we actually record and we look through the viewfinder of the camera, we will see that character one is now on the right and character two is now on the left. Now, if, if when you're editing your scene or editing your storyboard, and you put these two scenes together. As compared to this scene, you confuse your audience because no one is on the left and your audience will be like, wait, how did he get on the left that he walk across? Did he magically appear on the left, the day switch sides tunica, I'm confused. And this can really confuse the audience. And the main thing it does is actually it pulls the audience out of the immersive story you're trying to tell. Because when you're a storyteller, you want your audience to be absorbing and store. You don't want them to be distracted by any technicalities of filmmaking. You don't want your audience be worrying about these things and confusing them like this can pull them out. So back to the first one. What do you want to do is keep the camera on one side while the shooting. Now, your characters can switch sides, but you have to show them switching sides. You can make them switch sides in a cut. So what you would do is you would have, let's say you wanted character one to come to the right. You would have character one actually walk onto the right, walk towards the right, pass character to all in one shot to actually show any audience that hey, this character is actually moving past character to an entity right side of the screen. As seen here. You would never want to actually just cut and have a character on switching sides and confusing the audience. Now. You have to actually maintain this rule throughout a scene and tick, tick, keep it to keep the rule in place so you don't confuse the audience. And as I said before, if you want a character to move and switch, you actua actually have to show it. Let's say you broke the rule. And then for the rest of the episode, you keep breaking the rule. You're going to have to report the whole scene to get back that rule and the balance. And so you won't confuse the audience. Now, there are certain times where you can break the rule, and it's only the only time you can break the rule is actually when you want to make things less confusing. So let's say you're following the wanting to degree rule and you'll find that, hey, this seems confusing or I can show something clearly than you burn, you want it to degree rule. And there may be certain instances where you need to break the rule, but only break it so that you could be more clear or less confusing. Now, they wanted to regroup. Gray rule is pretty simple when it comes to two characters. But when it gets to three or more characters talking, like in the example here, you're not going to just get one line, right? You're gonna get, in this, in this case, you're gonna get three invisible lives with three characters, right? And this is where things start to get a little more technical and a little more confusing. But we got to break them down right here, right now. So character, one, character to character, all of these three guys having a conversation and we have the camera right outside, the invisible number three lines. So in the viewfinder, what we're going to see is at the bottom here, the diagram at the bottom here, the camera is closest to character one, and then maybe character three. And character two is probably the first character a week. Now, when you're doing shooting conversation between three characters, the best thing to do is to group two of the characters and to live one of the characters on the other side of the screen. So in this example we have character one and character two on the left and character three on the right. We still keeping the screen split into two. So let's say character one and character two is actually in the position of just another character. But what we did is we grouped them to make it feel like that. So in this, in this framing, we would feel as to character one and character two on the same side of the conversation. And both of them are against character three, who has an opinion of his own. So let's say we wanted to cut and get a different angle. And in the diagram above, we moved the camera to more today, right? But as you can see, we still have not jumped over the invisible 180, line three, right? We still behind it. And this is the angle you're gonna get. As you see, we still have the characters grouped. The three is still by himself and character 12 are grouped together on the left, so we are keeping screen direction. So basically screen direction is basically having character. Let's say a character appears on the right side of the screen. We can to keep him on the right side. And if a character is on the left side, are going to keep them on the left, so we do not confuse the audience. So guys, the 180 degree rule is really, really complex at first and it may take you a while to get used to it. Once you keep practicing, once you keep storyboard and it will come eventually, screen direction and all these complicated, complicated things. And you won't even have to worry about actually thinking about these things. They'll just come so naturally to you when you're doing is when you're doing your boards and you can focus on your story and more complex things. So we're going to move on to the assignment for this lesson. And it's going to help you practice. They wanted to degree rule. So let's move on to that. No. Okay. And now here I have a scene that I just made up with two characters. And I kinda really sketchy building here. And what I want you guys to do is to use this scene. I want you to create as many different shots as possible that you can with in the 180 degree area. So as you did see, I put some just three cameras in there and these are just samples of where you can place the camera to get a shot, right? So what I want you to do exactly is like this example here. What I did was I placed the camera behind the character too. And I created this wide shot of the two characters a bit over the shoulder of character to. This is just one shot you could create within the 180 degree rule. Now, I want you guys to create as many different shots as possible. It can be a close-up, it could be a wide, it could be medium. It can be a two shot. I just want you guys to create as many shots as possible within the wanting to degree rule using this sample scene of characters. So I hope you guys enjoy this exercise and see you in the next class. 7. 6 Compositions: Okay, In this lesson, we're going to talk about shock composition. Now. We just going to talk about a few rules that will help and guide you with the composing of your shots, right? And the first row we're going to introduce here is the rule of thirds. Now this rule is a very basic rule in photography and cinematography. And a lot of you may be familiar with it, but I'm just going to go through it for those who may not be familiar. Now, the rule of thirds is basically four lines to running horizontally and to running vertically, creating a grid of nine rectangles or squares dependent on the composition. And what these lines do is that they create full points on the composition. That these four points grid areas in your composition to play subjects or objects that will seem pleasing to the eye to an audience, right? So right now we have an example here with a medium close-up, close-up shot of someone, right? And the reason this composition is pleasing to the eye is because it's on that point, the person's face is on that point. And we want the audience to look at that person's face. Right? Now, this person is facing the right. So the best place that we could have put this person's face is on the left side of the screen and on that point, right. Now, if you want it, if the person was facing facing left, you better place would have been to put it on the right side, right? On that point, right. Now we have more wider shot with the full body of the character. As you can see, the face of the person is placed right on that dot. And it's a nice focal point for the audience to look at that. Really, really pleasing. And it's not jarring, it's not out of the way. It's not in any way positions, right? If you look at the whole scene, right, you could see that the character is looking at maybe do rock in the corner. And you could see the point that is created on the lower half of the scene. The rock is on that point, right? You have like the two subjects on those points, right? Now. You're not totally restricted when you're using the rule of two. That's right. You don't like totally, totally have to place everything directly on these points. They are much more of a guide for you when you compose your scenes and make it easier for you to place objects in this scene right? Now, those were the points on the rule of thirds. Now we're going to look at the two horizontal lines on the rule of thirds right? Now. These two, these two horizontal lines act as two areas in which you can place your horizon line. Now, in this first example, we have the horizon line b and d, the lower horizontal line on the grid. Right? Now, this, when you place your horizon line here, it's usually that you want to emphasize more of the top area of the scene. In this scene, we want to emphasize the sky and maybe the blue clouds over the house in this scene, right? So we would place the horizon line at the bottom there right? Now in a different scene where we would want to emphasize the lower half of the scene. We want to emphasize maybe more of the grass, more of what's happening on the ground plane, right? We can place the horizon line on the top half of the grid horizontally. So in this scene, we would want to emphasize more of the house and the car going towards the house. Now if you want to emphasize more of that, we wouldn't show more of the sky, right? It would show more of the line. So that is why in this one we, we carry the horizon line up more to what's the upper half. Alright? And even in this scene, we can see that we placed the two objects on the right. We have the car on one of the grid point, and then we have the House and the grid points because there are two focal points of the scene, right? The car and the house. Now, we're going to move on to another composition tool, or it's another way of composing is seen is a centered composition, right? Things. Directly in the middle of a scene. Now, when someone is watching a movie, when an object is placed like dead center in the composition, it usually pulls the most focus. So whatever objects are around that subject will always come, maybe second to the audience member. So placing objects in the data and as you can see, which is another good way of focusing your audience's attention is putting something in the dead center. Like in this example, we have a close-up medium, a medium close-up of his character and his face is dead center in the scene. Right? Now. We don't always have to place the person's face dead center. You can have some leeway when you place an object. So in this example, we have on the top one we have the, the medium shot of a person outstretched hand there. But as you could see, their face isn't totally in the dead center, it's slightly above. And you could place objects slightly above and still undescended, doesn't have the point, doesn't have to be between their eyes all the time. Dad said the same thing in the bottom here we have the subject. He is in the center of the screen, but he isn't dead center. This is, this is still okay to place your subject. He doesn't always, always have to be that you have some leeway in between the areas around that center. Right now, even self, when you're doing wide, wider shots and you have more scenes with buildings and outside. You can also use it that sent a composition. So in this one we have a house in the middle of the field, and we want our audience to look directly at the house. We don't want the audience to be distracted by anything else from this source because we know that the story is happening in this house and we want them to focus on that house. It's the same thing with a subject placed in an online environment, right? There's so much complexity is happening in the environment and maybe subject might be really small. One the subject to be small. So we could show the environment. What we would do is place the subject in the dead center, right? That's if we want audience to focus on our subject, even though he's so small in the scene. Using dead center composition will make it a lot easier for the audience to focus on this subject. So now we're gonna move on to our next way of composing your scenes. And it's understanding object size in your scene, right? So the basic idea here is that any object that is really large in your scene will pull most of the attention. And it will be telling your audience, look at this object because of its size, it will relate to it's important. So size is relative to important. So in this scene, we have a guy who is much closer to the camera. And you could see in the background, we have people maybe in a crowd looking on right. Now, the most important thing in this scene, obviously, because of his size, is this character in front who seems to be ready to engage in a fight of some sort, right? So he is the most important object in the scene. Now we have our next example here, with a guy pointing a gun to what, someone or something right? Now, the most important thing in this scene is the gun. Because the gun is almost as big as the person in the scene, right? The second most important thing in this scene is the actual guy. But most, most important thing is the gun. It's the deciding factor in the scene. And the way we do that as we increase the size of the gun in the frame. So we create a sense of massive importance is the same thing with these buildings here. You could use size for characters, you could use size objects, you could use size environments. Now, in this scene we have a sense of massive, massive structures here and there. So huge compared to the person who is at the bottom corner, bottom left-hand corner. He isn't as important as these massive structures and is seen when we look at this scene, we know that the structures are the most important things in this scene. This scene could be used as maybe opening scene or a wide shot to show where the story is going to take place. And we're showing the importance of these structures in that scene. Alright. So we're going to move on again to another. We have composing your scene and it's cool. Frame within a frame right? Now, basically, in this shot type, we're going to use elements in the scene itself, right? That create frames, that would frame an object of importance, right? So basically we have the camera if you find it right now within the camera viewfinder. In this example, we have a character who is behind some trees. Now, if you look at the branches of the trees, you will see that they create a frame that's not really a square, but it frames the subject in a space, right? And this Freeman allows the audience to focus even more on that subject, right? It creates a frame of, it, removes all the other distractions from the scene and allows the audience to focus on that frame. So let's look at another example here. Now this is an example. Let's use a lot of movies using the door frame as a scene, well, as any frame of the door as a frame within the frame of this scene right? Now, this really allows you to focus on the character within that room. Now the audience is outside of the room, but the frame allows us to not be distracted by anything outside of the door frame. So this is a really, really nice frame within a frame scene, right? So these are rules that you could use to help you in terms of composing these scenes, right? We're going to move on to your assignment now for this class. Okay guys, for the assignment, what I want you to do is choose a scene from your favorite movie or any movie. Alright? Then take screenshots of every shot in that scene. I want you to draw the rule of thirds grid onto each well, its frame. And when you draw the grid, I want you to analyze how the seniors compose. Do any of these subjects fall on any of the points of the rule of thirds, right? And then I want you to draw it dead center grid on the same scene. Analyze the scene, and see if the director use this as a guide to compose the scene. So here are some examples of what I want you to do. I took some screen shots of scenes from the last scene, and David Fincher has seven. And what I did was I just really just drew the guidelines of the rule of thirds onto the scene, onto, onto the composition. And I basically just did that to see where the director places subject, if you place them on any of the points to see how he composed this shot as compared to the rule of thirds, whether he used the rule of thirds or he didn't use the rule of thirds. This is just a basic exercise for you to try to help you analyze scenes and break them down so that you can eventually use seeds that you see in your store. 8. 7 Camera movement : Let's talk about camera movement now as a storyboard artist, to make your work more dynamic, just add in that extra movement of the camera could be so essential to scene. For the psychology of a scene, a type of emotion you will want to express and you want the audience to fill in that scene. Knowing the various camera movement will really add that extra length to your storyboard. The first camera move and we're going to talk about is the pan. The pan is basically tuning your camera from left to right, from right to left, right. Now He punctured you don't actually move the entire body of the camera. You don't pick it up and tune it. You just turn it on its axis so that it follows the subject. In this example, you can see we have a character standing in front of the camera. So it demonstrates how the camera will adjust to it on its axis, the various joints will show you that, okay, this is where the camera is tuning. Now, how would that look in a viewfinder? See we have the character, the beginning point of the character. He is in the middle of the viewfinder. We want to turn the camera to the left. So as we turn the camera, you're going to draw the character moving more and more towards the right of the screen because we're turning the camera left and turning the camera to the right. In this diagram here, the character will see in being moved more and more to the left of decomposition. So this is how you would probably approach drawing upon, while drawing the movement of the camera. The subject will move in the opposite direction of the commerce. So it would create that illusion of a pan shot. Remember, we don't actually using live-action, so we're not going to actually use R2 comma, but we have to simulate the movement of the camera in the pons shot. Now, what if we have, let's see, I'm moving subject and we want to pan without moving subject is going to look something like this. So let's say we have a character running and I see you running towards the camera. And then you want to follow the action of the character as he runs past the camera and keeps going. No, this is basically how you would draw. To simulate that when you're, when you're drawing, you won't actually draw the character in the frame like this. To simulate that, I just drew all the stages of the character running in this scene. So you would see, oh, I approach it. Now in this shot, you have a 2 perspective because you have the character coming from one direction. And then as you pan the camera, it will create another point on the horizon line, but there'll be a second of perspective on the horizon line. So it creates two points, right? So you would draw the character running towards you. The closest point of the character, it towards the camera. It would be more of like a side view. And then as a character runs away, you would see the box. So when you carry this and carry this into the editing program and you actually submit, lead, the movement of the camera on each frame of the character appears. As the camera pans, you will simulate a panning shot on the character running through the scene. So I'm going to show you an example of how I do this now, it's basically just like this. So this is a storyboard that I did that incorporated this type of simulation of a punch up. We have two characters coming up escalator in a train station. And they're gonna walk past the camera. And as you can see it, I simulate this shot by drawing each sequence as they are. And at the beginning you can see that there's 1 perspective here. And as it camera tunes, you got another point of perspective of them walking away. So this is an example of that. Simulate an apparent shot of moving characters. So now we're going to talk about the tilting of the camera. So basically tilting is the vertical movement up or down of the camera. We still not actually moving the body of the camera from one place to the next, but with tilting it on its, on the axis, the y-axis to be exact, we tilt it up or tilting down. So this diagram here you can see the camera is facing character and we are showing the range of the tilt of the camera right now, let's go and look at it in the viewfinder. So when we're drawing it tilt, you're going to have to draw some distortion in the tilt to simulate the movement of the camera. Now because the viewfinder kid only see a certain range and when we drawing it, we want to simulate how the camera sees things. So you would have to draw what I told you. You're going to have to draw entry point perspective with slight distortion and you draw this distortion. So when you put it in your tier editing software and you actually do the tilt. Movement and the software, it won't look where it will look more accurate to real life because the distortion is how we hold the camera would actually see it. And it will actually look normal because they are very various points of perspective moving up and then down to the character. So you're going to have to simulate those points of perspective in one joint. So you're going to have tree points of perspective. Let's look at another example with this tree, right? So let's say we wanted to draw a simulation of a tilt shot. We're going to have to draw it just as we did with the previous character. We're going to have to draw it with 2 perspective with the distortion of various points of perspective. Because as we move the camera, we're going to be changed and perspective. And we don't want to draw something with just one-point perspective. And as we pan, we get, we don't get the effect that we want. We want to create that effect that the camera is here, but it's tilting, it's not moving. This is the fact we want it tilted movement. And we're going to have to draw, draw the subjects like this for your storyboard to create that effect. So here is a small example of the tilt shot in action. So this is a castle I drew with the distortion elements apply with a 2 perspective. As you could see you as the camera tilts down from the top of the castle down to the bottom of the castle. You don't really notice the distortion in the drawing because if you find it, is only able to see so much. Now if you view the drawing, the full drawing, you'll notice that the distortion, and it would seem unrealistic. But because the way the camera tilts, this is a nice way of simulating that Tilton camera. Now, the dolly shot, also known as the pushing or push out, is a shot where you physically moving the camera closer or further away from your subject. So the dolly shot is a way of combining two shots without having to cut in-between shots. For example, a dolly shot could begin as a wide shot and then end with a medium close-up shot. Now with the Zoom shot, the difference between this and the dolly shot is that you don't physically move the camera, is Zoom is an optical change, the focal length. And what that means, in other words, is basically magnification. With a zoom shot is subject becomes larger in the frame and your background becomes compressed. Zoom shots remove the sense of depth in your frame. Okay guys, for the assignment for this class is gonna be a little different. It's going to be a little live-action kind of assignment. So what I want you to do is if you have a camera phone or a digital camera. What I want you to do is just go out and shoot using these camera movements that we've just learned about. I want you to use the pound shard it till shot the zoom and the dolly. And just shoot different things. Just be creative and just get used to the different types of camera movement and let them become part of your vocabulary and telling stories. So have fun with this assignment and just be creative. See you in the next class, guys. Thanks a lot. 9. 8 Drawing from Script: Storyboards are almost always done using the help of a script. During the production pipeline of an unlimited show animated movie I write, I would pass the script onto the store. What team who then use the script degree these storyboards. In some cases, Muslim feature film production as storable team would start creating stories, sketches without a script. But for this example, we will be using a script. Now, once you have your finished script or you're saying sequenced, the first thing you should do before even thinking of drawing is reading your script multiple times. I would say radius scrub as much time as possible given the assigned deadline. Reading your script at least five times should be good enough for you to grasp the overall idea of this store presented to you. It is important for a story artist and know the story or sequence from beginning to end. Or you create an rough thumbnails is a great way to get those first, initial ideas out of your head. So you can see them on paper. Many storyboard artists use of very rough thumbnails to get their ideas are fast. Sometimes these thumbnails are so rough that only they can understand them. The reason thumbnails are so effective is because you use little time and effort to get your ideas out onto the pH. It isn't very important at this stage that you don't fall in love with your ideas. You have to see past what looks really cool and focus on holy scenes soup the story. As you go over a rough pass, think about your story. Think about the emotions you want the audience to feel when they watch this sequence. Think about the shots. You think they would make the motion show even more. I find that when I'm working on a sequence and is seen as missing something or can be improved. And I feel it in my gut, my brand maybe get lazy and tell me that the sequence can work as it is, but my God always knows where to improve. Always listen to your gut when it tells you to improve on something. Never get lazy when reporting because eventually you're going to have to show it to your director. And sometimes, well, most of the time, that gut feeling I had to change something is sometimes always pointed out by someone else who watches it. So always listen to your gut and reward when you feel to report. Many of you might have heard the phrase, story is king is a freeze. Every story artist should live by, not, no matter what kind of story are working on. How do you go about solving this story? So keeping the concept of stories king in mind will influence the shots and staging. You use one storyboarding a sequence. For example, let's say you were storyboarding a sequence introducing a heroic character. The shots you would use with probably includes shots like a low angle shot, which would give the effect of a strong, powerful character like this one. Or maybe you are storable and our secrets with someone who feels alone, We'll probably more use a wide shot to make the character feel small and insignificant in that environment. You would never choose shots for sequences just because you like to use those shots. Two shots that will enhance the story of your scene or sequence. Now for the assignment, I will be giving you a partial script will go on. For the first part of the assignment. I want you to read the script at least five times. Then for the second part, I want you to do a rough thumbnail path of the script. So this is a script written by Brian McDonald called Freeman. I want you guys to read it five times and then do a rough pass it. This is the opening scene of the script, and it's not too complicated. For the third part, I want you to take your thumbnails and put them together in a storyboard. Then I want you to reward the same sequence in two different ways. This will help you to not fall in love with your initial ideas and to help you develop the skills of telling a story in multiple ways. This doesn't mean that your first ideas are wrong. Sometimes the director might love your first idea, but for the sake of improving your versatility, creating different storyboards on the same sequence will help you improve. So that's your assignment for this week, guys. Good luck. 10. 9 Clean up: So let's talk about cleaning up is storyboards. My first professional auditing as a storyboard artist was at his studio and salt Korea called funny flux animation. When I first began working there as an intern, I was assigned to work as a cleanup artists are the main storyboard artist on the team. This job involves taking the completed storyboard from this story artists and cleaning their boards to make them more clear. Normally a storyboard artist work would be very sketchy. The cleanup artists usually traced the boards and make them Clara makes the characters more and model and adding that extra detailed storyboard artist didn't have time to work on. The purpose of cleaning up storyboards is so that when they're passed on to the animation team, there will be no confusion or misunderstandings when they look at the storyboards. Some fans, very rough boards can be hard to understand. In this lesson, we are going to look at cleaning up some rough storyboards and how much detail you need to add onto the boards to make them presentable without wasting too much time. Let's take a look at the rough storyboard I did for this sequence and the process of creating these storyboards, I created a shorthand that was so loose that the characters looked pretty much like Stickman. It can be really hard to tell the characters apart. If you're not the person who created the storyboards, in some cases, you would have character designs to work with to help you clean up the storyboards. Sometimes you may not have the final designs yet from the design department. Using the character design reference, you should try and add important character details so that the audience knows who is who. So now I'm gonna do a demonstration of cleaning up storyboards for you guys to see how I approach doing it. And then I'm going to tell you guys about your assignment. Okay? So this is the screen grab from the previous rough storyboard that we can to clean up. Now, I chose this one because it fairly has enough characters and enough background to show you guys all that goes into cleaning up a storyboard. Now, before we clean up the storyboard, I want to show you the character sheet we're going to use for this storyboard. Now these are a bit rough character designs of the characters. So let's just see that your design team send these rough but not final character designs to you for you to use to clean up the storyboard. So you're going to be looking at these character designs and you're going to clean up your storyboards using this reference. So let's get started with cleaning up. Usually when I clean up storyboards, I would have the character designs opened up on a separate monitor. And then I would just reference it when I'm cleaning up. So in this shot, as we said before, it has all the characters. So we gonna start cleaning up now, the first thing that I do is that I would draw the background first. So if that's the groan or if it's like some walls and some trees in the background, I draw that first. Now in this example, we just have the ground. So I'm just going to draw in the grid. And when I draw in the grid or the background, I put that on a separate layer. So I'm just going to draw in the grid and then put the characters on a separate layer. So once you have your grid in place, you get then sat, booking on your characters, which would be on a separate layer. I usually put all the characters on one layer on less, like I need something specifically moving differently from the character layers. So I'm going to start off with the character and its center, which is Jordan, who is this character in the scene. And I'm just going to start cleaning up the storyboards would de-reference in mind. Now, it doesn't have to be a poor representation of the character from the character designs. It just needs to be a more cleaned up, well constructed funtion of the character. And as you watch this, you will see that it's not totally exactly like the character designs. It's, but it is more closely referencing the character design as compared to the foos rough paths, which was basically just a stick man. So usually I would, as I go on, I would repeat the process for all the other characters and clean up the characters as we go along. So let's cut to finishing up the characters. Now once I finish up the characters, the next thing I would do, if necessary, for this type of production, would be to add some gray tones. Now, the reason you want to add gray tones to storyboard is two. For one, make things clear to draw attention to certain elements in the scene that show more important, right? So the two things that have the most important in the scene, or the characters that are looking up at something. So we want the audience to focus on them. So when we add the grid tool, and it's just gonna be simply by making an increase in contrast on the characters. We simply going to add a grid tune to the background, and then we're going to add a white onto the characters. Know, adding this would create a real big contrast on the characters. And it would draw the eye of the audience to the characters. And that's basically why we add gray tones to storyboards. And this is basically how a cleaned up storyboard would look at the end. So now if you flip back and forth between the two, you could see how much different it is. It's not super, super complete. It's not likely the final product of the production, but it would be much clearer and more understandable when you pass on these storyboards to the next team, most likely be in the animation team, who could then interpret your storyboards and animate the scenes accordingly without any confusion. So for your assignment for this class, I want you to take the rough thumbnails that you did for your previous storyboard, for the Freeman script. And I want you to do clean up. And I want you to add some gray tones to your storyboard. I want you to use the gray tones to help you add more clarity to see for your audience. That's your assignment for this class. Good luck and see you. 11. 10 Pitching: Okay, everyone know that you have your storyboards ready. In this lesson, we're going to talk about pitching your storyboards. Pitching is basically getting up in front of your director. I'm presenting your storyboards of a sequence. The main goal is to make the director understanding sequence clearly. So what I'm going to do is to share some suggestions that may help you pitch your boards more effectively. So first things first, make sure and prepare. Practice pitching or boards to a fellow artists before it main presentation nor the boards and the dialogue like the back of your hand. Most of the time, you may have to do the voice-over for the characters in your sequence. If you are comfortable doing the character voices, go right ahead. But if you're not doing your own voice is good enough. Speak clearly. Try very hard not to mumble through your sequence, project vocally to your audience, present with confidence, sure that you are really confident in the sequence. If you're not confident, it might affect the overall impact of a story on your audience. The next suggestion is make sure and have a nice piercing fair presentation. Try to make everything flows smoothly and effectively. Don't stop to over-explain technical things like screen direction. And don't stop to compare your shots to other movies. Don't be too horrid to Rashtriya sequence at the expense of being clear. Short energy while presenting, but don't over OK, and draw attention away from your boards. Talking in front of people is a number one fail few months. One way of getting rid of your fear is to focus on the boards you're presenting. Concentrating on your storyboard will help you feel less self-conscious. Always remember to be yourself and you will be fine during your presentation. So now I'm going to do a sample pitch. It's going to be short story that I wrote and the storyboards for. So let's do it. Since opened with this really cool looking toy cities that a kid is like all this toy is so awesome. He runs across those. Mom pulls her time, mom, mom, mom come and check and look at this toy. It's so awesome. Pull it across the room, check it out. It's so neat. Look, mom. She looks across, looks down at the price that too expensive. Well, right now, could you, could you listen to me for a bit? Right now? You see, I can't really afford something that expensive. But I want it. Rubs her hand. It looks across to the other side of the store and sees a cheaper t-shirt. She's like, Come on, let me show you something a little more cooler. Walks across the toy store. He looks back and he noticed that the toys moving further and further away from him gets sad. It's like Look at this, look at this T-Shirt. It's really awesome. It has Ultra Man on it. That's not cool. I don't want that. Well, I guess you won't get the coal altering powers that come with this t-shirt. Yep, only special people get the powers and put this t-shirt on. Really, I want the ultra wing powers. But you have to be really worthy to get the powers. I'll take it, I'm worthy like here, then put it on and get your altro empowers. Yeah. He puts it on, imagines that he's turning into altering juice based supersonic. Flying to almost light-speed. Stops and see this alien creature opening up to you. You'll never destroy the universe. I'll stop. You. Love monsters, charges that in. Flies up. She goes ahead it but suddenly stops because something distracts them. It looks over, Mamluks over to the other side of the store that could you get that toy for me? Wow, it's so awesome. Thanks, dad. Books over the kid getting the toys. Oh, I don't want this anymore. Okay, guys. So basically that was the pitch. Basically what I did is that I just add in some dialogue, I mean, some rough description of what's going on in the scene. This quick pitch could definitely be improved. But you get the basic idea of what you need to do. Like, I didn't stop to describe, like shots and pan shots and Sandy, the camera is going to Pontiac zooming in here. Those things are unnecessary, or do you need to do is just add more effects, more torque. And because the antibiotic is already showing them things, and what you need to do is add Onto the automatic and give it sound effects. Try and make it as close as possible to the final film. So now that you've seen an example, Let's move on to the assignment. So for your assignment, what I want you to do is take the previous story boards that you created and I want you to practice pitching the boards themselves alone, the dialogue. All defects in the scene. I'm practice doing it. And then I want you to pitch it to maybe a friend, Bridget maybe do a brother or sister and just practice pitching it to as many people as possible until you get used to the art form of pitching your storyboards. That's your assignment for this class and see you next time. 12. 11 Portfolio: So before we talk about what you should have in your storyboard portfolio, I want to talk about the formats you can present your portfolio in. First of all, there's a physical copy of your portfolio. You basically you organize all these storyboards together and you print them out. And then you can create that, create a book, go bind it together, right? This was the only way to show your boards in the past, it was effective if you're attending a convention or workshop and you wanted to easily presented to the employer or to like a senior storyboard artists for critique. Now the downside of this format is that you may not always have your portfolio on you when you're going out and you never know who you might run into. Like having a physical copy of your boards could be restrictive in terms of being ready for opportunities. The next thing about the format for a physical portfolio for storyboard is the format of the actual storyboards because physical copies can be put together and antibiotics, physical copies of a storyboard portfolio could only have the traditional column or row format. Now there are some reviewers that like to flip through one panel pH's in PDF format. And this is another thing the physical copy can do is have one panel pH for them to flip through really fast and a PDF format, you can print it one panel Bu pH, but then you would have these really thick portfolio and that's not a good idea. Now the second format you can have your portfolio and is a digital one, and they form of a website dedicated to just your storyboard. There are many free websites that you can build your portfolio on. Blogspot are wings or Tumblr. And if you can afford it, you could go for one of the period ones like Squarespace, etc. Now the big advantage of having an online portfolio of a physical portfolio is that you will have easy access. It will always be there on your phone, your laptop, or your computer connect. Once it's connected to the internet, ready to show someone. You can also send it via link to anyone via e-mail, WhatsApp, anything is very convenient. The second advantage is that you can create antibiotics and upload them on your website. Physical portfolios can have another matrix as we said before. Now antiemetics, sure, more obvious cinematic skills, right? Because antibiotics involve editing, voice, actin, pacing, et cetera. So antibiotics are a great thing to have in your portfolio. Now, the way I've been talking, it would suggest that you should only have a digital portfolio, a digital storyboard portfolio. What I would actually suggest is that you have both. Because at the end of the day, you never know what could happen. Maybe that storyboard artist you look up to, or that storyboard artist who is looking through your work. Maybe they just so happen to love physical copies of storyboard portfolios and maybe that's just their thing. And they might hire you because you have a physical portfolio and maybe somebody else, I prefer PDF or maybe somebody else might have people watching antibiotics. So the main gist of this is to have all of them ready. I would just suggest to all Pavlov physical copy of a website, instagram, Facebook, whatever, just be ready for all of them. I'm just telling you all the ways you can be ready now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about what you should be putting in your storyboard portfolio. Now the first thing you should know is that your storyboard portfolio should be geared towards the industry that you want to get into. For example, let's say you want to do storyboards for Disney or DreamWorks Animation. Your portfolio should not have storyboards for live action films or commercial book. Your storyboard should be in the vein of animated films. Now studios that do animated films look for different things as compared to live-action studios. For example, Disney looks for storyboards that have lots of gesture, drawing, nuance, acting with the characters, and a variety of emotional and action oriented scenes. Also, your style should be similar to the work of the studio you are applying for. Disneyworld probably quicker hire someone who can adapt to their style quicker over someone that needs to be truly into drawing their style. Now, this is a pretty obvious suggestion, but always keep your best work to the front or the beginning of your portfolio. You don't get a second chance to make a good first impression. Try and leave you all unless strong work to the back of your portfolio. Or you could put your weaker work in-between your stronger pieces. The next suggestion would be to tell a variety of stories. Trying not to have storyboards that are only in one genre. If you want to put five storyboard on your portfolio. My suggestion would be to have a love story and action story, a horror story, a sad story, and maybe even a musical. This will show your employer that you can handle a variety of stories and your range is very wide. The last step I want to share with you guys is something a little different. It's something you should be aware of while showing your portfolio to a senior artist or a potential employer. Tip is to be quiet and listen. When receiving feedback, listen to the critique you are getting ticket in. Try to understand the point of view of the art critic in your work. Don't interrupt them to make excuses and ramble. Keep your ego in check. You may feel a bit hood if the critic is harsh but learning as P and for, and it's worth the group. So just listen and take everything in. So guys, this was some tips and suggestions on putting your portfolio together. I hope it helps you if you didn't know these things. I came up with these points, basically from trial and error applying to different studios. And they've given me feedback on my portfolio and I just wanted to share it with you guys. Hopefully this helps and good luck would put in your storyboard portfolio together. 13. 12 Overview : All right everyone, we have finally come to an end of introduction to storyboard. In this video, I just want to do a little overview of the course and give you a last bit of advice. Now for those of you who never knew about storyboarding before, there would have been a lot of information in here to absorb. But the great thing is you can re-watch these videos as many times as possible because they are free. Just in case you didn't understand something. Those of you who are familiar with storyboarding before this class may or may not have been introduced to new information. But if you did and you still watched all the videos, it shows that you're hungry to learn new things and you're just learning constantly, which is really good. Now, these videos covered the basic knowledge that you would need to know when working on storyboard. But the greatest challenge in creating storyboards is not knowing the rules of storyboarding, but actually creating on telling your stories. The only way you will get better at storyboarding is by creating as many storyboards and telling as many stories as you can. Practice doing boards from scripts. Or if you want to write your own story and storyboard, that most of your improvement won't come by watching videos of classes, but from creating your stories and your storyboards. There'll be things that you will learn that could only come from creating these storyboards. And learning from the actual process of creating storyboards. Work as hard and as smart as you can. Tell the stories that you want to tell. Don't create stories that you think would be popular. Create stories that you would love creating. You will actually create better stories if you enjoy creating them. Everyone has a unique story to share with the world. So make sure and tell yours. Before I say my final goodbyes, I just want to make a last bit of a shameless plug. These classes will be here, always free of charge, and I will be adding new classes as much as I can. And they will be available for free. But thank you for watching. I really appreciate you taking the time to watch these classes. Good luck with everything and see you guys next time.