Storyboarding for Film or Animation

1. Learn to Storyboard for Film or Animation: Hi there. Welcome to this complete guide on learning how to storyboard. My name is Siobhan, I teach animation and storyboarding and I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare. I have over 15 years experience working in the animation industry. [MUSIC] This class is my ultimate storyboarding class. [MUSIC] I've distilled everything that I know and everything that I've learned from working in the industry into this class. I've designed it specifically so that you can learn the exact skill set that a professional storyboard artist uses every single day. You don't have to have any prior knowledge of storyboarding. You also don't even need to be super skilled at drawing, I'm going to teach you how to draw for storyboards. You don't even need to have fancy software or drawing tablets. You can start with a pencil and a piece of paper. All you really need for this class is an interest in film and animation and a desire to tell your story visually. Here's what you'll learn with me today. To start out, you're going to learn how to draw for storyboards, from stick figures to original characters. I'm going to teach you the tips and the techniques to get good at drawing. You'll learn how to draw dynamic poses and how to draw in perspective. Next up, you'll learn the basic building blocks of film. These are the camera angles and the shots that every director uses to make film or animation. Then you'll learn exactly how to break down the script, how to thumbnail it out, and how to create a professional and finished storyboard. You're going to get to work on a one-page scripts that I wrote specifically for you so that you can practice these steps yourself. The storyboard is something that you can include in your own portfolio if you want to show it to a studio or a client, and land a storyboarding job. Finally, in the last section of this class, I'm going to expand on everything that I've taught you and give you a proper grounding in visual language. This section is going to cover principles of composition such as the rule of thirds or symmetry. I'm going to explain what these rules are, why they work, and when to break them. You'll also learn about specific storytelling shots about the 180 degree rule, and you'll also learn about moving camera angles and how to draw them on a storyboard. Throughout this class, I'm here to help you along the way to give you advice and to give you feedback on your work. You'll be joining thousands of other animators, filmmakers, visual artists who have already taken this class. Many of whom have gone on to work professionally as a storyboard artist. I think you'll be really inspired by their class projects and by the content that you'll learn here today. I can't wait for you to get started and to start storyboarding. Meet me in the next lesson and I'll explain how the class is structured and I'll explain about your class project. [MUSIC] 2. Introduction to Storyboarding: In this first lesson, let's take a look at how this class is structured so that you know what to get out of it. I'll also explain your class project. I've structured the lessons in this class into four main sections. In the first section, you're going to learn all about how to draw for storyboards. This is going to be really fun because you'll get to draw basic male and female characters, learn how to make dynamic poses for your characters, and you'll also learn how to draw in perspective. The second section of the class will teach you all about technical aspects that go into storyboarding. Things like camera angles and shots, I'm going to show you how they work, why they work, and when to use them. In the next section then, you'll get to work on an actual script, your thumbnails are storyboarded out from start to finish. If you go over to the projects and resources tab on your desktop, you can download the script that I've left for you there, as well as the templates that you'll be working in. In the final section, I'll teach you all about the visual language of film, and how this affects the stories that you tell. I've put this material in a section on its own because I think it's really important that you have the experience of working with a storyboard and boarding it up first, so that these more advanced concepts will make a lot more sense once you get to them. They're going to give you a proper grounding in filmmaking going forward. That's the complete outline for the content in this class. Just so that you know how we will progress through it all. You can use this as a checklist if you like for your progress. If you have any questions at all, drop them into this discussion tab, I'll be there to answer any questions that you have. To submit your work, again, go back over to the projects and resources tab, and there you can upload your images. You'll also be able to see your fellow students work, see how they've approached the same sequence, and I think you'll find this a really inspiring place. Definitely check that out and leave a comment on their projects. Before we dive into the lessons, I'm just going to give a brief description or definition of a storyboard, so that we have a working definition going forwards. A storyboard, as you probably know, is a sequence of images that visualizes the action of a script. You might also note that it's made for the sole purpose of getting ready for production. So that the director or the producer can see the flow of shots and make big directing choices before any money is spent, apart from your wages. The other crucial, very important thing that you might not know about a storyboard, is that once it's locked and decided on, it becomes the blueprint for the entire production. What that means is that everybody in the crew who is working on that project, will be able to refer to your storyboard as the foundational document. They'll be able to see what's going to happen in each scene simply by looking at your storyboard. The last thing to know about storyboards that you might not be aware of is that not all storyboards are done in the same way. For example, a live-action storyboard is very different to an animation board. In live action storyboards, there's much more of an emphasis placed on blocking out shots that are going to be used, or blocking out camera movements or big action sequences. Whereas in an animation storyboard, the emphasis is very much placed on the acting within any scene. In that sense, everything gets storyboarded. For this class, you're going to learn a broad overview of storyboarding that will fit both live action and animation. I'm going to lean a little bit more towards the animation side of things because that's the most inclusive approach to storyboarding, and therefore that's going to be applicable to live-action projects that you might want to work on. Up next, in the next video, I'm going to explain what you need to get started with storyboarding, and what you need specifically for this class. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 3. What You Need for Storyboarding: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to cover what you need for storyboarding and what you need to get started with me today. Now, as I said before, you don't need any fancy software or drawing tablets, you can use a pencil and a piece of paper. That's all you need for jotting down your ideas or your thumbnails. But I just wanted to point out right now that if pencil and paper is all that you have access to today, that's perfectly fine in this class. The next level up would be to scan those drawings into a computer so that you have them in a digital file that you can email in a PDF format to a client or a studio. You could also scan your hand-drawn images in and work on them in a digital drawing software like Photoshop. But if you do have access to digital drawing tools, then you can just start drawing in Photoshop. Photoshop is not the only drawing software that's out there. You could use Procreate on the iPad, you could use Krita, and there's also a drawing app that I really like called Sketchbook Pro. There's even a software package called Storyboard Pro. This is specifically geared towards professional storyboarding and it has everything that you need in one program. You can easily keep track of numbering your panels, sequencing. That's all totally automated. It's a really good way to work, but it might be a little bit complex for a complete beginner. If you wanted to follow along with me in something like Photoshop, then that's totally fine. Now, if you are working digitally, the one other thing that you do need is a drawing tablet. I personally use a Wacom Intuos Pro. So my setup is really simple. It's not a big tablet at all. It's not as antique or anything. It's just a very nice Intuos Pro medium with a stylus. Now, if you don't want to go with Wacom, there are cheaper options that you could look into, but I definitely recommend that if you are keen on drawing for storyboards or digital art at all then definitely invest in a drawing tablet. I'm going to be doing all of my demos in Photoshop because that's just the easiest for me to draw panel by panel, and what I normally use is a storyboard template. I've left you a few templates to use, including a thumbnail template as well as a final storyboard template. If you go over to the Projects and Resources tab, you'll find them there. That's all you really need to get started. Hopefully, you're setup and you're ready to go. So meet me in the next lesson and I'm going to share with you my top seven tips for drawing for storyboards. 4. Simple Tips for Drawing: Before we dive deep into the world of storyboarding, here are my top seven tips for how to draw when it comes to animation in general and storyboarding in particular. These tips will help you to simplify your drawings and to make very quick shorthand sketches for characters and for scenes. My first tip is always warm up. When you sit down to start drawing. Just a few minutes of warming up will help you to loosen up and to get confident drawing very quickly. Over time, these drawing drills will really improve your line quality. In storyboarding, the whole idea is that you need to be able to draw your ideas very quickly. Simply take a few minutes to draw some loose circles or some straight lines, but keep it going and aim to fill a whole page with circles or a whole page with lines. My second tip is to draw a rough. Now, this is another one that's not immediately what you might think of when it comes to improving your drawing. But I always encourage people to try and keep your initial drawings or thumbnails as rough as possible. This will help you obviously to draw very loose and fast, but it will ensure that you don't get bogged down into details, and lose your way. Rough drawings have a dynamic energy, and that's what you want in your storyboarding. I also like this tip because so many people think that they can't draw. Actually, your rough drawings are a great starting point and are a great way to get your ideas down on paper and to prove to you that you can draw what you imagine. My third tip is when you're drawing your storyboards or roughing out some thumbnails, use a simple grid in your panels. Now, I'll be explaining in perspective in much more detail later on in the class. But just be aware that by simply adding in a horizon line and a few grid lines, it can instantly give your drawings grid composition and context. It has the added benefit of helping you to practice drawing in perspective. It's very good to get used to drawing with a grid. My fourth tip is to keep your face simple. Even if you're working with detail model sheets for characters, when you're roughing out your storyboards and thumbnails, you can draw heads just using a simple circle or oval shape. You can indicate the direction of the head by using this cross line in the middle. A horizontal line for the eye line and a vertical line for the nose. When you place brush in the middle of your oval or circle, it instantly indicates which way the head is turning. It's really effective, and it helps you just to quickly block in your character without having to get into the details of the features of the face. My fifth tip is about eyes. Eyes are the most expressive feature of any character. Especially if you're trying to draw dynamic emotion in your characters, then really focus on the eyes. For this tip, I would encourage you to practice drawing eyes as much as you can. Now, you don't have to get into detailed, realistic-looking eyes. But I just wanted to show you this is what normal realism looks like for simply drawing eyes. But for stylized or cartoony characters, you want to be able to push brush to the extreme. Let's say you're drawing surprised eyes. You would really push that idea of the oval or the round circle for the eyes. What I would do is maybe keep the pupils of the eyes very small and in the center so it really looks like the character has wide eyes. For something like frightened eyes, you could have the eyelids angling upwards like this and the eyebrows as well. For angry eyes, I would angle the eyebrows downwards and really push that eye shape so that it looks like there's a lot of anger behind those eyes. Another shorthand for something like a cheerful face, or smiling eyes is to indicate the cheeks pushing upwards like this. You can get really creative, this is a great exercise to see how many different emotions you can draw by just drawing eyes. Similarly, another tip is to focus on practicing mouth shapes. Now, in animation, particularly for dialogue, there are a certain set of conventions that are used, short-hand for mouth shapes for different letters. If you Google mouth shapes or mouth charts, you can easily find different shapes for mouths, and I would practice drawing those as well. Then my last tip is to practice drawing hands. For characters, especially in storyboarding, hands are going to be another big expressor of emotion. A lot of people skip over drawing hands. They're a bit complicated and finicky, but you can really simplify them, and it makes it a lot easier. Just spend time practicing these. Make drawing hands part of your drawing drills. A good professional insider tip is to make sure that you don't have all the fingers looking the exact same. Try to vary the position of the fingers a little bit if you are practicing hands. It just gives a lot of life and a lot of character to the hands. Those are my top tips for practicing drawing, for animation, and for storyboarding. I'd encourage you to take some time right now and practice some of these ones that I've gone through, I'd love to see your drawings. If you want to share them with me, post them up in the project section, or drop a comment in the discussion tab. 5. How to Draw Characters for Storyboards: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to give you some pointers on how to draw basic male and female characters, as well as show you how to draw stylized figures. For the most part in storyboarding, you're really only expected to draw what I would call a design of a figure, not necessarily a real person as such. For that reason, you can rely on some really useful guides and templates in order to draw figures. The most common convention or template for drawing characters is to break the proportion up into eight head lengths. You use the head as a basic unit of length. What that means if you copy each of these out, then you more or less have proportions for the entire height of a standing figure. This is really useful to work with. It now enables you to divide the standing figure up like this. You have one head height, obviously, for the head, you can have two head lengths for the upper body, one length for the pelvis, two for the upper leg, and two for the lower leg. Now that you have it broken down into these sections, it's much easier to tackle drawing a figure and you can start to draw each section. Now, this is by no means a hard and fast rule, in fact, it's not even that helpful if you need to draw a character in a different pose. But as a starting point, it's a really good way to learn the proportion and the structure of a generic human figure in this way. If you practice this, then eventually you will be able to intuitively draw in proportion. As you can see, I've sketched out something of a skeleton now. I've drawn the upper body just as a simple shape to indicate a ribcage and I've drawn the pelvis in a very simplified blocky shape. I'm very sure that the elbows are positioned at the midpoint of the upper body. Generally speaking, the length of the arm comes down to something like the top third of the upper legs. Without getting to more detailed into that, you can actually work with this very simplified mannequin and build a character on top of it. You could go and add muscles and shapes into this figure, but I think I'm going to go straight ahead and just draw a character and clothing. Do it in red on the layer above it. As you can see, I'm just simply following the shapes that I outlined really simply. There's no need to overcomplicate it at this stage. I'm not trying to draw a hyper-realistic figure. [LAUGHTER] This is stylized, it's very simplified, and that's what we want. I'll just indicate very likely some features of the face. Now if I turn off my skeleton or mannequin that's underneath, you can see it's a really successful sketch or design for a basic male character. Now you could definitely add more detail here, but the idea is just to show you a method or a template to draw up a basic character. If you want to draw even more stylized, more dynamic and cartoony characters, then the way I would do that is to pair things back even more, get more simplified and more stylized. Think of the whole upper body as one block. Follow the outer edge of that block down for legs with a simple shape for feet and bring a line down like this for the arm. Now because this is hypersimplified, it means that you can really push the poses. You can exaggerate this character. Experiment with putting this character in different shapes and see if you can invent poses that you might not have been able to imagine had you drawn a more realistic or fully fleshed-out character like the first one. It's much easier to put characters into poses because you are working with these simple shapes. Really, it's just one block and a few lines for the legs and the arms. Now let's look at the same process with the same method for drawing a female character. You can follow the exact same template as before with proportions of eight heads for the full body length. The separate divisions are the exact same. All you need to do is just make sure that the hips and chest are wider and the waist is thinner. The rest is the same. The arms and legs have the same proportions as before. Just as before, I'll make a drawing on top of this basic mannequin. Following this structure, I find clothing very easy to draw because it really covers up the shapes of muscles. It makes everything a little bit more simplified. That looks good, that looks great. From here, let's extrapolate out again and draw some hyperstylized female characters. The way I do that, instead of using a blocky shape for the body, you can work with the idea of a more triangular upper body to give that hourglass shape for the female figure. Once you get comfortable with these simplified shapes, you can put them into some nice strong poses again. In the next lesson, I will be showing you how to really push your poses and give you some very good pointers on exactly how to create dynamic character actions. But for now, take a moment to practice drawing a page or two of characters in these simple blocky shapes. Then when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 6. How to Use the Line of Action: [MUSIC] So far in this class I have been emphasizing drawing rough and part of that reason is for you to get your drawings and your ideas down as fast as possible. The other reason is that the more gestural your drawing style, the more expressive it is. Simply put, rough and loose drawing can lead to very powerful dynamic gesture drawing. Having expressive drawing is really your ultimate goal when you're drawing characters especially for animation. In your storyboards you want to be able to demonstrate your characters as expressive dynamic poses so that the acting comes through in each panel of your board. I'm going to show you in this lesson exactly how you can achieve strong dynamic poses out of your characters in a really simple but really effective way. That very simple way is to draw poses using a line of action. A line of action is basically a line that goes from the head of the character down to the toes or vice versa from the toes right through to the head. It's a line that describes the direction of the pose. It's not necessarily a line that you'll see in the final drawing but it is the basic starting point or the foundation of any pose. It tells you immediately if the character is leaning in one way or another. It tells you the gesture of the pose that he's taking and it describes basically the whole pose in just one line. So the best exercise is to draw a line just like the way I'm doing and on top of that, start to build up your pose afterwards by adding the head and the limbs. In animation, the standard convention is that a line of action through the human figure will either be an S curve or a C curve. So these two poses here are S curve lines. But you can also pose out your character with a C curve to show your character bending. The idea is that the line of action goes right the way through the middle of the body. So very often you might have to add the arms or even the legs going in totally different directions but that's okay as long as you can identify for yourself the main or major line of action through the pose. Like everything I've been saying so far, the more you practice this, the better you'll get. This really helps you to come up with fun and interesting poses. I wanted to show how you can use this idea to push a pose that you've already drawn. If you've drawn your character and it just doesn't feel strong enough, this is a fail-safe way to improve it. Let's say you've got a character or two characters and one is punching the other one and you've drawn out your action and it looks like this and it just feels really flat and boring. Well, that's because both of these characters have really static line of actions going through them. In each one the line of action is just straight up and down. It's not moving. What you can do is draw a really dynamic line like this to exaggerate the pose or to push it to an extreme. Now you have a much stronger action and you can really actually feel the force of that punch in this simple drawing. Don't be afraid to push the line of action even if you think it's too extreme or too far because the likelihood is that you will have hit the mark really in your character posing. Exaggerate your poses as much as you can and you'll end up drawing really strong dynamic poses. 7. How to Draw in Perspective: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can make sure that your drawings are always correct in perspective. Once you know how to work with a perspective grid, you'll never draw incorrect perspective again. It's really useful for helping you to compose interesting and detailed shots. The basic concept of perspective is that the horizon line that you always draw into your composition is actually the eye-line of the camera. What I mean by that is say for example, you set up a camera here, and you're capturing a scene that has two trees in it, then this is how you would see that scene in the perspective view. One tree is further forwards to the front. It's larger because it's near the camera and the other one is a little bit further away in the distance. In this example, this is pretty much horizon line or camera eye-line that's in the middle of the frame. But you can also have the camera at different heights. If I just copy this scene out and drag it down, I'll show you exactly what I mean. Let's say we have the camera that's up here tilting down and it's looking down on this scene from above, almost like a bird's-eye view. In this shot, you're looking down on the trees and your perspective drawing would look a little bit like this. This tree, the leaves and the foliage would be much larger and the tree trunk would taper away down towards the ground. Of course, if we have the same setup but with a very low angle, what's happening here is that the camera is down low. Let's call it a worm's-eye view. It's looking up at the scene and the shot then would look something like this. A high horizon line means that the camera is at a high angle looking down on the scene. A low horizon line implies that the camera's low down looking up at the scene. These drawings are very simplified, but it's just to demonstrate or to give you the idea of how you can change the horizon line in any given drawing or panel simply by changing the camera angle. This becomes really useful later on when you're trying to use camera angles and shots to underscore the narrative, but I'll be talking about that a little bit more when I get into composition and storytelling shots. That's the general concept of how you place your camera in terms of perspective. But, now let's look at exactly how to draw things and objects in perspective. The best way to improve your perspective drawing is to practice drawing cubes and boxes. I have to warn you in advance, this might be a little bit boring, or tedious, but it really is the fastest way that you'll improve. Eventually, as always, if you practice this drawing drill, it'll become second nature, and you'll be able to just intuitively and instinctively draw things in your scene in perfect perspective. Let's look at one-point perspective first. I'm going to start out with a very simple grid to demonstrate how to practice drawing these boxes and cubes. I'll draw a straight line right across the middle of my frame like this. This is the horizon line. In the middle, I'll just place dots here to indicate where the vanishing point will be. Now from here, I'm going to draw radiating lines, diagonal lines coming out from this point. To make a straight line in Photoshop, if it's diagonal, what you want to do is ensure that you're using the right brush. I'm just going to right-click on my Canvas to bring up the brush panel. What I want to choose is the hard round brush, because if I used the tapered brush, the line wouldn't read as a singular line, it would taper off. What I want to show you is how to draw a very dead straight line. Make sure you choose that brush hard round and make it quite small, maybe like five or eight pixels or something like that. Then to make a straight line, you tap on one point, hold down Shift on your keyboard and tap at the end point. That'll give you a lovely straight diagonal line like this. I've drawn in all my radiating lines, now I'm going to draw lines running parallel to the horizon line. For that you just need to hold down Shift and simply draw straight across. This is my grid, so I'll bring the opacity of that grid down, make a new layer on top, and then I'll choose another color. I'm just now going to follow the lines of the grid and start to draw out cubes, boxes. If I follow the grid as best I can, the boxes are in one-point perspective. The idea is to practice this as much as you can draw as many boxes and cubes. Don't worry too much. You don't have to be completely rigid at following the grid. As long as you get used to and get comfortable with following a general perspective line in your drawing, that's what the whole point of this exercise is all about. Trying to fill up a whole page with boxes and cubes. Now, you can have one-point perspective that's on [LAUGHTER] a different heights like I explained in the earlier example. That's pretty easy. You can just draw a horizon line. Let's say up towards the top. Let's put our vanishing point over to the side so it's a little bit off center. Then go through the same procedure again to make the grid with diagonal lines radiating out from one point. Remember this is one-point perspective. Then if I lower the opacity down, I can draw cubes on top of that. You'll notice you're getting slightly different shaped boxes, but this is still one-point perspective. Then for a low angle, let's draw a horizon line down very low with our vanishing point off to the left this time. Join our grid. Bring the opacity of the grid down and work up some boxes. Sometimes I don't follow the lines exactly, and actually I think that's a really good practice as well so it gets you comfortable for when you have to draw with Azure Grid. But you can always place this grid into your drawings and then delete it after you've roughed out your composition. But definitely ensure that this is part of your regular drawing drills. The last thing I want to show you in this lesson is two-point perspective. I am going to start with another blank Canvas. The thing I want to point out about two-point perspective is that obviously as the name implies, you have two vanishing points on a horizon line. But the thing to note is that you need to nearly always have your vanishing points outside of your picture frame. The reason is because if you have both vanishing points within your picture frame, your drawing will be very compressed and will look a little bit distorted. If you're setting up a scene or if you want to draw a background or something like that, I would just crop the Canvas wider and just place your vanishing points slightly outside of your frame. From one vanishing points, I'm going to do radiating lines yet again. Then from the other one, I'll do the same lines but in a different color so you can see what's happening. Once I've got all of that complete, that is the grid because they intersect, they form the grid. You don't have to draw lines parallel to the horizon line in two-point perspective. Now let me draw one cube just to show you how it works. Again, I'm just following the grid lines and I'm matching up my verticals to the diagonals as they come from each side. But you'll note that all of the diagonals on the left travel towards that left vanishing point. The diagonals on the right side of the cube travel down towards the right hand side of vanishing point. If I just color in this left side of the box, that's going to the left side and the pink side of the box is going to the right side. Again, use this as a warm-up or drawing drill. Draw as many boxes as you can. I promise you, if you do this for even a couple of weeks as a regular drawing practice, you will see huge improvements in your drawing overall. Well done. [LAUGHTER] We've got through probably one of the most technical and the most challenging parts of learning to draw, and that is perspective. I have given you just a simple overview or a basic overview, but really, that is all you need. I get a lot of people asking about drawing dynamic three-point perspective or extreme down charts. What I would say to you is, try to master a simple one-point perspective or two-point drawing before you tackle things like an extreme down shot or complex three or four-point perspective, you really need to be very comfortable and confident drawing in one or two-point perspective first. If you can get to that stage, then you actually don't need to learn how to do a three-point because it'll just be instinctive and natural. This really lays the foundation and the groundwork for being able to draw complex perspective. I encourage you to make this part of your practice as often as you can. 8. Panels, Shots, Scenes and Sequences: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to elaborate a little bit further on the terminology of shots, scenes, sequences, and panels, because it can get a little bit confusing. I want to explain these terms in the context of the main differences between live action storyboards and animation storyboards. I'm aware that this might be getting a little bit too technical too early. Really in this class, I want to focus and place the emphasis on getting you more comfortable with drawing stuff before you get caught up in technical aspects. But it is good to talk about these things at the beginning so that there's no confusion and so that you're at least aware of the main differences. When it comes to talking about scenes and shots on storyboard templates, you need to know that there's a big difference between live-action boards and animation boards. If you're working in live action and by that I mean a feature film or a short film with actors, not an animation production, then you are dealing with scenes and shots. A scene is where the action will take place during a specific duration of time and in a specific location. When you go to another location, that's a new scene. Within that scene, you're going to have all of your different shots that describe the action that takes place within that scene. If we take a look at this scene, this is all one scene, but each of these panels represents a different shot or a different camera angle. In live-action film, these would be called shots within the scene. Now let's take a quick look at an animation storyboard. This is one that I'll be using for this class and you'll get to see me working on this a little bit later on. But essentially in animation, you have one sequence that's made up of scenes. In animation, the terms are used slightly differently. Instead of having a scene that's made up of shots, you have a sequence that's made up of scenes. As animators, we just like to use the word scene to mean a camera angle or a shot or a setup. But, for example, this one sequence here, this is where the character climbs out of the hole in the ground that he's been digging. He climbs out, he's really angry. Well, this is made up of two separate scenes. This scene has two panels, showing him standing beside the hole in the ground and scratching his head, getting really angry. Then you go to a different scene, which is essentially a different camera angle. It's a close-up and that's a new scene because it's a totally different or new angle. Just to sum up, a panel contains your drawing, that's your storyboard panel. In animation, a scene refers to the camera angle or the type of shots, and a sequence refers to the duration of time or the location where the action is taking place. In live action film, a shot refers to the camera angle, and the scene refers to the location or the duration of time. 9. Every Camera Angle and Shot that you Need for Storyboarding: Shots and camera angles are the language of film and as a storyboard artist, they're your building blocks. You get to decide exactly how the film will be experienced. Every panel that you draw is essentially describing a camera angle. In this lesson, I'm going to get you familiarized with all of the main camera angles that you will come across. You'll probably know most of them already if you're at all interested in film so it's going to be something that should come as second nature to you. Camera angles are often mostly described as being either eye level, high angle, low angle, or what's called a Dutch angle, which basically means the camera is tilted. A camera shot refers to the size of the camera view. Now, the six most common shots are the establishing shot, the wide shot, the long shot, the medium, the close-up, and the extreme close-up. There aren't too many more shots other than these and any other ones that you will come across are usually just a variation on one of these. Some other terms that you might come across is a two shot or an over the shoulder shot but those describe where the characters are, they're not necessarily referring to the size of the camera itself. These six shots represent the main storytelling shots in all of cinematic language. I'm going to look at each one. The establishing shot is what it says, it establishes the scene. It's a very wide angle. It usually shows the audience where the action is taking place and it's very often used as an introduction to the story so it's a shot that you might see at the beginning of a movie or even at the beginning of a new sequence if the action is suddenly in a new location. After the establishing shot, you can use the wide shot. This is not as sweeping or as ground as the establishing shot, but it's still very wide in order to give us a good impression of the location and this is a shot that you can cut back to and use if you've had a series of close-ups or medium shots and you want to reorient the viewer again remind them where the action is taking place. Without having to go to a really wide, big establishing shot, you can simply cut to a wide shot. Now the next four shots, you can think of them as being really more oriented towards character than the previous establishing or wide shot. Those two, you could think of as being applicable to the landscape or the environment and the next four as being applicable to a character. That's not a hard and fast rule, you can certainly have an extreme close-up of an object, for example, but it's a good way to remember the order of these shots. After the wide, you've got the long shot. It's called a long shot because if there's a character in it, you will see the head and the feet of that character. So you'll see the full length of the character. This is used whenever you want to show characters moving around. It's very useful for that because it gives a bit of context, but it still shows us the character very clearly. After the long shot is the medium shot, and this one is where you start to get a little bit closer into the character. It's from the waist up to the head. This shot is generally used when you want to show the character using his or her hands. So it's a good shot to use because it's still close enough so that we can see any emotion or acting on the character's face but it's further back enough so that the character can use his hands and pick things up if necessary, or things like that. After the medium shot, you've got the close-up. The close-up is probably one of the most important shots in all of film because it's the one shot that you can use that will really focus in on the character and it helps with audience identification, which I'll be talking about a little bit later on in this course. But for now, just think of the close-up as being simply the head and shoulders of a character and it's the shot you will choose when the character is speaking or if you want to show emotion on the character's face. After the close-up, you've got the extreme close-up, which as it implies, usually hones in on just one area, like the eyes or the features of the face. But as I said previously, you could have an extreme close-up of someone's hand or of an object, something that you really want to drive home the point with for your audience. The extreme close-up, just bear in mind, it can be a little bit claustrophobic and a little bit intense. It's usually used to really heighten attention and the drama of any scene. Later on in this class, I'm going to be talking a little bit more in-depth about things like audience identification. You'll also learn all about other combinations of shots, like the over the shoulder or the point of view shot. But just for now, get to know these six main shots and of course the main camera angles and you'll quickly start to see them and recognize them in movies and films that you watch. You'll begin to pick them out. You'll be able to see how they're used in any given scene. It's really interesting to try and identify these types of shots when you're watching a movie or a show. 10. The Storyboarding Process Explained: In this lesson, the last lesson before we actually start storyboarding for real, I want to quickly explain where the storyboard fits into the overall production process. This is essential for you to understand because very simply, your work gets used by literally everyone in the production team once you've finished storyboarding. You need to make sure that your work, once you're done, can be picked up by someone else and understood clearly. I'm going to attempt to explain the entire pipeline by storyboarding it. [LAUGHTER] The very first step is that there's always a script. If there isn't a script, there's at least an idea or a concept. But either way, you will start the whole production off with some idea in written format. Your job as a storyboard artist is to draw the action of the script or the concept. What you'll do is sit down, thumbnail it, draw the panels under the direction of either the director or the producer. But ultimately, it's your work that will be determining the look of the film. At this point, there may be a few revisions that you might have to do, some back-and-forth between you and the producer or the director to really clarify the look and clarify all of the shots. But once that work is done, once the storyboard is locked, it is then broken up into individual panels and brought into editing software, where it's matched up with a recording of the dialogue of the movie. This is done in order to make what's called an animatic. Now, an animatic is a movie version of the storyboard that you've just drawn, where each panel is edited into a moving sequence. Very often, if you're working within professional software like Storyboard Pro, then an animatic is something that you can do right inside of the application. Oftentimes, you'll be expected to produce an animatic as well as the storyboard. However, it's really important to note that the reason that there is an animatic is because this is where the director times out every shot, especially in animation. That really isn't your job necessarily. The director is the one who makes those directing decisions at this stage while he or she is watching the animatic. Now, the reason the timing is so critical is because in animation, once things are timed out, those scenes are then sent off to the animators. The animators get to work on them. You can't really go back and change things or make one scene longer because when you do that, it would shift the timing in all of the other scenes. In an animation production, the locked animatic is the final, final version of the storyboard. But as I say, once that's been achieved, the production team then splits up the animatic into scenes and gives them out to the animators. The animators take the scene, which is essentially your board panels, and they will animate the characters for that scene according to how you drew the action. The same goes for prop builders and for background artists. Each department in production will receive a cut-up animatic, and each department is responsible for creating the final artwork, the final assets for each scene. When all of that is done, all of that work then gets fed back into the editing or compositing software. The director and the editor sit down together again, and they will literally match up the completed animation, the backgrounds, the props, to the original animatic, making sure that there's nothing missing. That's how they arrive at the final version of the film. As you can see, your humble little storyboard has a mass of life after it leaves you. It goes to every single person in production and it's literally the cornerstone and the foundation of the whole project. With that in mind, let's dive into our own project. Up next, in the next lesson, I'm going to explain how to break down your script, and then we'll start thumbnailing it out and drawing the panels. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. How to Break Down a Script for Storyboarding: The process of blocking out or breaking down a script into sequences and scenes enables you to approach your work in small, manageable chunks so that you can get through the whole script easily and efficiently. That's what I want to demonstrate in this lesson. For the next few lessons, we're going to use the sample script that I wrote. Now this is just an example. It's a couple of pages of a completely made up script that I wrote for you. But we'll use it to explore the process of drawing a storyboard so that you can see for yourself firsthand how it's very straightforward and very manageable. The best way to break down a script is to first of all, identify these sequences and then identify the beats within those sequences. As you read through your script, you should begin to mark off each part of the script that feels like a moment within the story and that's a beat. For example let's look at the script. It says, exterior day the sun is beating down on the scorched earth. That's one beat. The next section of the script says, we see a lizard that darts from under one rock, goes darts under a rock. That's another beat. Then the camera pans, that's a third beat. Then we see our character digging. That is a fourth beat. Now we can mark up or jot down some initial ideas for camera angles and for shots. Obviously we want to start with a big wide establishing shot because this is a Western and we need to show that sweeping grand panoramic view of the landscape. We want to show the audience where the action is taking place. It's out in the desert. You know, the sun is at high noon, things like that. The next beat in the script is the lizard. It's obviously going to be a close-up of a lizard darting out from under the rock because you wouldn't be able to see a lizard in a long shot or a wide shot. The next beat, the script indicates that the camera pans along the ground. Maybe that's a low angle shot that starts from where we saw the lizard going onto the rock and pans along the deserts. At this point, possibly you could cut wider. Suddenly we see that it's our character Reinhold digging the hole in the ground. That's obviously going to be at least a medium shot, if not a long shot, we want to see the character, but we also need room to see him moving his arms and showing him digging. Then I think what you could do is cut back to a long shot because he needs to climb out of the hole in the ground and throw the shovel down and say his line. Then maybe to finish it off, you could end the whole sequence with a dramatic close-up of his angry face, him shaking his fist. What I've done here is basically block the scene out in terms of what shots I think would work to tell the story. These shots are by no means the only choices that you could make in terms of camera angles. There are countless combinations that you can go to. For the sake of this class though, this is how I would approach on a first pass anyway. I would suggest keep it simple if you're blocking this out for yourself. Let's keep going. The next scene is the exterior town during the day. Again, you could start off with a nice wide shot in order to re-establish for the audience where we are. We're now in a new location. We're in the town or in the main street. This is where we pick up on the sheriff who let's say is coming out of the jail. That's called the sheriff shock. The sheriff is going to walk across the street and go into the saloon. That could maybe be another panning shot across the street. Then obviously we're going to cut to the interior of the saloon, so it's a new location. You've got a couple of options here. You could follow the sheriff from behind as he goes through the doors, almost like go inside with him, walking through the doors. I would say like a medium or a long shot tracking him walking in, or you could establish the camera already inside the saloon from the point of view of maybe people inside the bar and see him coming in walking towards camera. I like that idea because it's almost like the audiences already inside the saloon were watching the action from inside. It works for me in that sense. Then we can just do a panning shot or something like that. See him simply walking across the floor to the bar. The next sequence is a dialogue sequence between the sheriff and the bartender. Now, in film and animation, there are standard setups and standard shot sequences that you can go to for dialogue. One is called the shot, reverse shot, and another is the over shoulder shot and the point of view shot. In the next section of videos, I'll go into that much deeper into storytelling shots like the over the shoulder shot. But let's just give this a first pass. I would probably start off with what's called a two shot, which shows both the characters in the frame. Once the dialogue starts going, then I think I would give each character a single shot. In other words, the camera would be just on one person while he says his line. Then you use a reverse shot showing the second character saying their line. We will put in a couple of over the shoulder shots because in a dialogue sequence it's always really important to make that connection between the two characters. You always want to have at least one over the shoulder shot that shows the character speaking his line with just the corner of the head and shoulders of the second character. I'll explain it in the thumbnailing section. It'll be a lot clearer then. These shots, by the way, are all mediums or close-ups. We can figure out the details of the over the shoulder shots when we get to draw the storyboard. But this last line here is the cue for the third character to enter. I'd cut back to a medium shot of both of these characters and have them looking off-screen. That can be the cue for the third character of Gretta to enter in the scene. For her entrance, I would definitely go for a long shot. I think that should be a very dramatic entrance. We'll see her at the bottom of the stairs or something like that. She will appear and walk up to the sheriff and throw this bag of diamonds over to him. That's the end of our sample script. I think we've got pretty much all of the ideas down for shot ideas and camera angles. In the next phase of our project, we're going to start thumbnailing these out in very rough, almost like stick figures, drawings. Then we'll take them to the finished storyboard. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 12. How to Draw Thumbnails for Your Script: Now that we've broken down the script, it's time to get started thumbnailing and drawing our ideas out. Usually your thumbnails will be drawn on a simple set of panels like this. You don't have to use a storyboard template for your thumbnail ideas because this is all about just being very experimental and you can change your ideas up much more easily if you use just a simple set of panels like this, and don't worry too much about the size of the panels. As long as they are rectangles, there's no need to worry about dimensions at this stage. This is, as I said, just for sketching. The other thing that I don't want you to worry about right now is your drawing. Keep it very, very simple and as rough as you like. Now, according to my shot breakdown, the first shot that I identified was that establishing shot. Let's do that. We need a nice big wide shots of dislocation just to set the scene, just to show the audience exactly where we are. I'm going to make this look really like quintessentially western desert here I'll have those iconic mountains in the background. Maybe cactus or two in the foreground, and even maybe some bones of an animal just to show that it's a very harsh environment, something like that. You can be really imaginative at this point. Then next up, the next shot is that close-up of the lizards that we want to see darting from one rock to the other. What I'm going to do here is show that action in two separate panels. Basically, I need to draw this panel first showing where the lizard is coming out from its darting out from one rock. Then once I've got that drawn, instead of redrawing it again in the next panel, I'm just simply going to copy and paste it over, and then I'll erase out that pose of the lizard and draw him in his second position. Now, it clearly shows the action for that little tiny scene, and there are two positions that we want to see this lizard hit, and that's really clear for the animators. Then they'll know when they get their scene, that there's two main poses they're going from one rock to the other. Next up is that big pan. I'm going to use two panels for the pan and just draw right across them like this. In this second panel, that's where the camera will stop and we'll see the character of Reinhold digging in the ground. When we draw this on the proper storyboard later on, I'll show you exactly how to indicate the camera moves but for now I'll just draw an arrow to remind myself that this is a pan from left to right. That's going to be followed up by our medium shots because we now want to at this point really cut in closer to the character. We've established him digging so now we want to know a little bit more about who this guy is. We'll cut in a bit closer trying to see a little bit more of them but the medium shots still allows us to be back far enough so that we can see his hands and see his action of digging. The next shot up is that long shot who is going to climb out of the hole, and what I'm going to do is work backwards in a sense. I want to split this action of Brigade into two panels. First, show him getting out. But what I'll do is first draw the second panel just so that I know for myself what the long shot looks like. I need to have the full length of the character. Once I've got that established in that panel, I'm just going to simply copy it, move it back over here, and now I can much more easily draw the proportion of the character as he's getting out of the ground. Sometimes that's easier for me to figure out the length of the character to see him standing first and get that shot right. Then do the drawing that's slightly more complicated. That's fine. That looks good. Again, I am going to simply copy this drawing over to this panel. Now I want to draw him getting angry. The action here is that he's frustrated so he's going to throw the shovel on the ground but in order to do that, you do need to have two separate poses so that it really reads as a dynamic action. He's going to swing it up first of all like this, and then on this panel he'll smash it down like that. By the way, I hope you're seeing the lines of action that I'm putting to work here. My C curves helping me to make these poses really, really strong. Brilliant. Those panels work. That's all one scene essentially but now the animators will see exactly what action is necessary for this scene so they're going to know how to animate him because all of the main poses are very clearly shown. The next shot, he's getting angry and I'm going to cut to a high angle looking down on him. This is going to emphasize his alienation and he's alone in the world type of thing and give that vibe as he gets angry. But then the final shot of the sequence we're going to cut into an extreme close-up showing his face and this is the first time we really see the features of his face so that's going to be very dramatic. I think time for a little break. Go make a cup of tea or coffee or grab some water and when you come back, we're going to thumbnail the second half of our script. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. How to Draw Thumbnails for Your Script Part 2: [MUSIC] Great, welcome back. The next sequence to thumbnail out is the bar sequence. We start off for the sequence with another wide shot of the town. Again, I'm going to take up two of these panels so that I can combine them for this panning shots. It might seem like a complicated scene to draw but really I'm just blocking things out at this stage. I know that I want the sheriff to be walking from the left to the right and crossing over, going to this other side where the saloon will be. It can be as simple as that and we can fill in the details later. I'm just going to indicate a random cowboy where some other character loitering in this corner just to frame the scene, give it a bit of interest. I've also had the idea that maybe as the camera pans along from left to right, we have a random horse trotting through the frame. Again, that'll break up the action, it'll add a bit of interest to the opening scene and just give a bit of life to this town. The Sheriff walks across and we're going to see him going up the steps and into the saloon. The next shot then is going to be inside the saloon so I want to block that in very rough. These are those swinging doors where he will walk through. But I think I want to show him more like already halfway through the doors. It's good to show the action already happening as he steps inside. Now normally, the convention for animation anyway is that if you need to show an action in detail, just like we did in the last section with the lizard or with the character of rhinos, you would draw that action in a couple of panels. But sometimes if it's as simple as he's just going to be walking across the frame then you can use an arrow to indicate the direction. Now, here's an example of getting a little bit creative in your storyboards and deviating from the script a little bit. I want to show the sheriff walking across the bar, but I want to do that from the point of view of upstairs because I was thinking that if I do that, that's a clever way to introduce the character of Greta, even though it's not in the script. This is where thoughtful use of shots can really tell more of a story than the actual words of the script. If we introduce Greta here in the over-the-shoulder shots like we won't see her exactly you just see the back of her. That's going to immediately give her a bit of mystery. We want to know who this person is, who's looking down at the sheriff. That's a point-of-view shot where it's showing a character's point of view. In the next panel, I'm going to draw her exiting the frame. As I said, these two panels do two things. One, they show the sheriff walking through this slightly dangerous scene. We don't know what's going to happen. There's definitely people looking at him. He's got eyes on himself. Secondly, we see the whole thing from this other character's point of view. Now we want to know who this character is and how is she involved in the story. The next few panels then are relatively easy. This is the dialogue sequence. Since it's just dialogue between two characters, it's very easy to just block it in. You can use each panel to show the characters dialog line as simple as that. But what I will say is always try to establish a connection between two characters if they're talking by using an over-the-shoulder shot like this. You want to be able to show both of them in the same frame sometimes in order to make that connection for the audience. Then when you want to emphasize one characters line, you can draw that character in a single shot. Then they both look around when they're here, Greta off screen or when they hear Greta enter. I would say that we should definitely see her in a long shot. Let's say she's just come down the stairs and she's at the bottom of the stairs. Next, I'll cut to a close up, in this panel she'll say something like, Is this what you're looking for and hold up the pouch or the bag in her hand. Then the final shots can be, or the final shot is that she's going to throw the diamonds across the bar. That's a really rough parts of our script. We've done all the major thumbnails. In the next phase will start to draw out our storyboard properly. That's when you can start to really finesse things not just in the drawing, but maybe in the shot choices as well. Maybe we'll decide to add in some more panels towards the end of this, just to flesh out this last sequence here. If you have a chance, now, pause the videos and start your own thumbnails for the story. Let's see if you can come up with some new or some different alternative camera angles, or shot sequences. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and we'll go through how to clean up these thumbnails and make a final storyboard. 14. Storyboarding the Desert Sequence: [MUSIC] Now we're going to start the process of drawing our final storyboard. In animation this process is called the clean-up phase because we're literally taking a rough drawings, and redrawing them to be more clean and more precise. You want to aim for a clean precise line, whereas in your thumbnail stage you're drawing with much more of a rough and loose line. I have my storyboard template here, I'm going to hop over to my thumbnail page. Again, I'm just going to take this step-by-step. I'm going to first of all, select the first few frames, copy them, and then back over it in my template I'll paste them into this document. I'm going to have to scale them to fit as best I can, but that's okay. I'm redrawing them, so it doesn't really matter. What I'm going to do is lower the opacity of that layer down and add a new layer on top. This is where I'm going to start the process of drawing much more carefully. As I said I want to define my drawings as best I can, and that means I'm going to go over the lines that's in my rough drawing but I don't have to stick to them exactly. I can draw things in different positions if I need to or move things around; that's okay, but I'm just generally following the drawing on the layer below and using it as my guide. Now at this stage you might be wondering, why would you make double the work? Why would you just draw something and then redraw it? Why not just draw it first off? [LAUGHTER] It's a good question, so I'll take this opportunity now to explain this process a bit better. The reason that we draw thumbnails first and then go on to the trouble of redrawing them is because firstly the thumbnails aren't really proper drawings, they're simply ideas. They're the concepts that you come up with, and you write them down if you like in a visual form. You'll always need to sketch your idea out first and see if it works before you draw a final version. Secondly, the thumbnails can be changed, and that's a big point to keep in mind. The final board when you get to work on it, really is the final board. The decisions have been made, the shot choices, the camera angles have all been decided on. If we needed to change any of the panels or the camera angles or make different choices, we want to be doing that at a thumbnail stage. The process that I've demoed here throughout is how I would approach things, but if I was working in a studio I'd have to actually show my thumbnails to the director. I'd like to get revisions and changes maybe multiple times before the rough drawings are signed off and before I was then able to move ahead and draw a finished storyboard like I'm doing now. Here I'm working on my own roughs and I didn't give myself any revisions. That's the beauty of being your own storyboard artist as well as your own director. I'm joking, but obviously it's good to know that if you want to work in a studio or for a client you do have to be ready and willing to make revisions and changes. You need to be able to change up your work and to follow direction. Personally I've had great supervisors that I've worked with, and I've also had supervisors who have given me a lot of revisions, some that didn't make any sense at the time but you have to learn to not be attached to your work or your process, and you have to learn to change things if that's what's required. But as I say the stage of the process, things should really be agreed upon by now. At this point, you just get a focus on drawing out the panels carefully and adding in all the details that are going to make your drawings look really good. At this stage, I've done all of my first three panels. I'm very happy with them. I'm going to chip away at the mountain of work and continue on through the next section. This pan is going to be exactly how I thumbnailed it out. As you can see, I'm just drawing over the two panels. I'm combining them into one long panel in order to indicate the view moving from left to right. When it comes to drawing [inaudible] in the hole in the ground, I'm going to keep it very vague at this point because really at this stage we don't see him that close-up. He's still this very strange mysterious character, so I don't want to put it into many details yet. The focus in this shot is still very much on the surrounding landscape. We are still emphasizing the fact that he's alone in the desert. For this shot, that's why I want to keep the camera a little bit far away from him until the time comes when we need to cut closer. Now once I'm finished drawing this pattern I'm going to grab the red color, and in red I'm going to draw my rectangle around both of the panels. This is how you would indicate that the two panels are just one big panel, and then to show the pan simply draw a line underneath them indicating the direction so that anyone else who reads this knows that the camera is panning from left to right. You're showing the start and the stop, and then you can also write your camera moves on your storyboard if you want to. This is the last panel for this page, it's the medium shots. We'll cut it in a bit closer. We still don't see the full face of her mysterious character, he's still hunched over. We see him toiling away under the hot zone in this hole in the ground. That's fine. I also think though that I could add in a couple of more details here that would give some more interests to the shot. I've thought about maybe adding in a bucket and a pic or an ax, maybe even a map to show that he's been using a map to find whatever it is he's digging for. Little details like that are really nice to add to the story visually, so if you think about them, if they occur to you, then definitely put them into your storyboard. The next page of our storyboard is going to complete this whole sequence, so the process is the same. We're just bit by bit drawing the panels with more detail just a bit more carefully. Here, we're cutting out to that long shots, so we're showing the character first of all crawling out of the hole, then he turns around, scratches his head. It's getting a little bit more clear now that he hasn't found what he's looking for. Now we know that this guy is maybe an unsavory character or he's up to no good. He's been foiled in his attempt to find whatever it is he's looking for. The next few panels will really underscore that unsavory nature because that's where we will see him losing his temper and vowing to revenge someone. We see him throwing his shovel onto the ground, goes into a rage, shaking his fists, and that's our high-angle shot. That's going to work really nice, I think, and then a very dramatic cuts into the close-up. This is the shot that really shows the character for all that he is. It's showing him very angry and vengeful, and it's the first clear shot that we get of this guy. That's a great way I think to end the sequence as a whole. In the next lesson we're forging ahead, and we're going to tackle the second half of our script and bring that to a final finished cleaned up storyboard. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson. 15. Storyboarding the Saloon Sequence: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I am forging ahead through the cleanup phase and I'm onto the next section of the storyboard. Here, I've copied the rough drawing over and I'm going to go in and refine it and make it more detailed. Now, it's totally up to you how detailed you want to make your panels. If you have any other ideas for characters or scenes, then you can definitely make your own work for the class project. You don't have to just follow my lead. But I did want to show you how things progress, how I work things out for myself. As you can see, especially from the last lesson, the process is very straightforward. There isn't anything complicated at this stage. We're literally copying out our rough drawings and just making them a little bit more defined. It takes a bit of time and a bit of patience because there is quite a bit of work to get through. But it's one of those situations where you can really zone in and just get lost in your drawing and enjoy the whole process. If you take it step-by-step, if you don't get too overwhelmed by the whole thing, then I think you'll really find that it goes by very quickly. Whenever you're faced with a mountain of work, just take it one piece at a time. I think that's the biggest lesson out of learning the whole process of storyboarding, is that you can break things down into manageable, bite-sized chunks and work a way at them at your own pace. I've drawn this big pan across the middle of the street in the town and I think it's working really well. I really like this idea that there's a horse galloping through the town without a rider. Is a bit quirky and it gives a bit of interest and a bit of action just to break up that otherwise quite boring shot. That's quite nice. I also like the character on the left watching the sheriff as he walks across the street. That's another cue that this sheriff is being watched all the time, it seems like. He goes up the steps and he is going into the saloon now. This chart is also a pan. Again, just like I did before in the previous sequence, I'm going to grab a red brush and I'm going to draw a rectangle around both of these panels like so. Then I'll draw my arrow going from the middle of the first panel to the middle of the second panel that indicates the start and the stop. I can write pan underneath. Perfect. Now we see him from the inside walking through the doors. I'm going to add in a few details here on the windows and I might add some lights or lamps on the walls. Then I'm going to sketch him walking through. Then these guys over here in the corner, I'm not going to get too detailed. I'm not going to draw their faces or anything. I just want to give the impression that they're in the corner having their whiskey, smoking, and they're looking at him entering. It's giving that impression or that vibe of the typical Western where maybe there's music playing in the bar or something like that. Everyone's talking and then the minute the sheriff walks in it just goes like deathly silent and they all just stare at him. I want to give it that impression. That's great. That's that panel done. Now, I'm going to draw out these three panels which shows Greta watching the sheriff crossing the floor. She's above. She's on the balcony looking down on the scene. That's going to give a very nice narrative twist to the sequence as well. It's this idea that the sheriff is being watched closely by a lot of different people and it's definitely heightening the tension. We don't know what's happening. We know something has happened with this guy who's digging a hole in the ground and now we see the sheriff. There's obviously some story here that needs to unravel in some way and I liked that we've introduced Greta at this stage because that shows that she's quite an important or pivotal character in the whole story. She's almost like a link between the sheriff and the previous guy that we saw, Reynold, who was digging in the desert. We're starting to ask ourselves, what's this all about? She goes off-screen right. She exits there and she mysteriously goes into a room and closes the door. In the next lesson, I'm going to clean up the final section of the storyboard and that's the dialogue sequence and Greta's entrance. Then we'll have a fully finished, completed and cleaned up storyboard. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 16. Storyboarding the Saloon Sequence Part 2: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm going to make the final section of the storyboard. That's going to be the dialogue sequence between the sheriff and the barman, and we're going to have Greta's entrance into the story. As before, I've copied all of the rough thumbnails into my storyboard templates, and I'm going to redraw my characters. This is the shot where the sheriff approaches the bar. Now I want to keep the barman with his back to the sheriff. Because I want to give the impression that the barman actually already knows that something's going on, and he's going to be the character who's covering up for Greta. He's definitely involved in the story somehow, but he keeps his back to the sheriff, almost like he knows that the sheriff is there. Sheriff Tucker approaches the bar, and in the background those two characters are keeping their eyes on the sheriff and watching what happens. In the second panel in the scene, the sheriff is at the bar, so I'll just copy that entire panel over. I'm going to just go in closer now and what I'm going to do is the barman is slightly opening his eyes. He can hear the sheriff behind him. Now, the sheriff is at the bar leaning in and demanding to see Greta. Now what's important to note here is that this setup more or less establishes the dynamic between these two characters. It also establishes their positions within the frame. What I want to do is keep this screen direction or keep these two characters where they are. I want the sheriff to be on the left and the barman to be on the right. In other words, when I cut to an over the shoulder shots of the sheriff and we see Abe, the barman turning around and saying his line, I'm making sure to keep the sheriff on the left side of the screen. That way, it's just good for the audience to watch the flow of shots. They're not going to get confused about where any of the characters are if you maintain screen direction in that way. That's just the standard convention in terms of screen direction. Even if you have your character in a single shot where the other character isn't there, it's just the sheriff. You won't be able to favor him on the left. In other words, here he's pretty much in the center, but his eyeline is looking to the right, which means that on screen right, will be the bartender Abe and so that keeps everything nice and consistent and we can follow exactly what's happening. We don't get confused about where each of these characters are. The reason I'm making such a big point about this is because it's so important in a dialogue sequence when you're dealing with one shot and then another shot, you try as much as you can to keep the two characters connected for the audience's sake, so that they can understand and follow the flow of shots. Abe is really now just putting the sheriff off, says I don't know where Greta is. We're seeing this line delivered, it's an over the shoulder shot from the sheriff's point of view. But then we hear something off-screen and they're both turn their heads and look. What we want to do is we want to cut to Greta in the next shot. Having both of these characters turn their head first in this panel, motivates that cut. In other words, in storyboarding terms, because they've both now looked around. We the audience, want to see what it is they're looking at, and that's what's known as motivating the cut. There's something happening off-screen and that's what we going to show the audience next. Sure enough, here is Greta standing at the bottom of the stairs. She's got their attention and she's got our attention the audience. She is standing there, she holds up this bag or this pouch, and she throws it across the bar like this. What we can do here is just cut to a close-up of her hand, throwing the bag of diamonds through the air and it skids along the bar. Then we can cut to a different angle and show the sheriff's hand coming into frame to catch it, just like that. She says her line. Then I think the last frame is he's going to empty the diamonds into his hand and that's the big reveal, if you like, of this entire sequence. We've pretty much got through our entire storyboard. That's all of the drawings done, and that's a lot of work, and if you've gotten this far with me, congratulations. You've got through a huge amount of work, that's an enormous achievement. Up next, I want to show you the final revisions that I would make to the storyboard. The final touches and also I want to show you how to add all of the texts and screen direction onto the storyboard, as well as how to number and sequence your panels. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 17. How to Refine Your Storyboard and Add Numbering: [MUSIC] Now that we've got a fully completed storyboard of our sample script, this is almost, nearly ready to submit for final review to the producer or the client. Now there are a couple of final cleanups that I want to do. I also want to point out how to number and sequence your board before you hand it off to anyone else. First up, I just want to point out that I have grouped every page into groups over here, my layer stack. Now this means that all of my pages for this sequence are actually in this one document. That just makes it very easy for me to keep everything organized and accessible. Plus when it comes to export as a PDF, it'll make that process a bit simpler. Now, obviously, this is just my workflow and I'm showing it to you as an example. If you're working in a different software, you can have your document set up differently. Certainly, you can have each of your pages on individual documents as well. Let's look at the numbering. I've numbered each panel, for example, this is the opening shot, as I explained before. I'm calling this it's just one scene. It's Scene 1 Panel 1. This next scene has two panels. So I've numbered it Scene 2 Panel 1 and Scene 2, Panel,2, and so on. You've got your pan. This is essentially one panel and the scene here is just one panel. That's all straightforward. On this page though, we can see that the scene has quite a few panels. Because we want the animators to hit each of these poses, so we posed out the action into four different poses, essentially, Panel 1, Panel 2, 3, and 4. Then we go to a new scene and this is a new scene as well. It goes on. That's very straightforward. As well as the numbering, I have also added the relevant texts from the script. I just simply copied and pasted over from the script, pasted underneath each panel. Now you don't have to include the whole entire script. Just include whatever line from the script is relevant to that drawing. Before final sign-off on this, there are a couple of tweaks that I want to change, little adjustments that I want to make on this board. One is at the very beginning and the other is at the very end of the storyboard. At the beginning in this first establishing shots, I actually really feel like we need to have some camera movement. I don't love at the moment how it's just a static shot. I'm going to add just a really small Zoom or tracking. What I'm going to do is draw a rectangle around the panel as it is. Make that in red. Then this is the start of the camera move. Then I'll draw a second rectangle where I want the camera to stop. Essentially, this is just a very small push into the scene itself. What I'm going to do is draw the arrows then going from each corner inwards to indicate the movement. I'll also note that the Azure rectangles Position A or the first position of the camera. The inner rectangle is the second position. Now, the very last change that I make is on the last page and the final sequence. I feel like the sequence is not working that well. It could be a lot tighter or a lot punchier, especially since it's like the high point or the big reveal. What I thought I'd do is cut this [inaudible]. These two panels are essentially one scene, but it looks like there are two different angles. What we'll do is actually bring them down together like this. Combine them so we can make a small camera move or small pan. This is a good example of a situation where you might need to pan from right to left. Because this panel here on the right is actually the starting point of the pan. We'll be moving back towards this panel. To make that point really clear, I'll even label the positions as A and B. That's much better now it's much more clear and much more concise. Lastly, because this panel is empty, what you would do on your storyboard if you ever have an empty panel like this, is just simply put an x through it so that they know it's not being used. 18. Introduction to Visual Language for Film: [MUSIC] Well, now that you know exactly how to draw storyboards, what shorthands and drawing tricks are best to use. Now that you know how to draw thumbnails, how to draw finished storyboard panels, I want you to start to learn a little bit more of the film theory and the concepts behind your work as a storyboard artist. This is because really the art of storyboarding is very complex. There are technical skills, there are artistic skills, and there are also conceptual ideas to think about. I think it's important that you had the experience of seeing the process of storyboarding at work first, get comfortable drawing, get comfortable working with a storyboard, and then with that knowledge, learn more about the visual language. That's why I kept us ready till the latter end of the course. The way I think about it, as I said, I see that storyboarding is really made up of three components. The first component you need is drawing skills. As I've shown you, you really don't need to be highly skilled drafts person by any means. Stick figures are perfectly fine. If you could draw even stick figures, it means that you can communicate your ideas visually. The second component that you need is technical knowledge. The storyboarding process is considered a very technical aspect or a technical part of the entire film making process. When you're dealing with shots, camera angles, numbering, and sequencing, that's all quite technical. The third component then is understanding visual language. For me, this is the part that really brings the first two aspects together and it is what makes the whole skill set of a board artist fully rounded and complete. Now, visual language in itself is an entire scope of knowledge. I really couldn't get in huge detail in this course. It is material that could make up a whole series of courses. But I can introduce you to some of the concepts. I think these concepts and ideas will help you so much in deciding how to choose your shots. In this video, I want to introduce you to two concepts. One is sequencing and the other is how you use the close-up for emotional intensity. Visual language as we understand it today really started to become formulated as a concept in its own right as far back as the 1920s.That is 100 years ago. It's a full century ago, people discovered or formulated this idea of visual language. It was really innovative. In the early days of film, they discovered that certain sequencing techniques really worked to tell a visual story and that the audience could quickly make connections between shots and sequences without needing any further explanation or any dialogue or voice-over. This is famous example, is called the Kuleshov effect. It's based on a Russian filmmaker who came up with this idea back in the 1920s. What he did was that he showed the audience a shot of a man's face, followed by the shot of a bowl of soup. When he played these two shots and sequence together, the audience, without any further information or dialogue, assumed that what they were watching was the story of a hungry man. Furthermore, they even saw or read his face as registering hunger. That in itself is interesting that they would make that connection. But what's more interesting is that he then showed another sequence using the exact same shot of the man's face. This time followed by a shot of a small coffin. In this instance, the audience felt such an emotional response to what they saw as a tragic story. They actually saw the man is suffering grief even though the shot that was used was the exact same one that they had used before and the man didn't actually move his face at all. The Kuleshov effect is also known as juxtaposition or montage. It's when you use one or more shots to evoke an idea or a state of mind when they're combined together. You simply get more information from a sequence of shots than you do from just one shot alone and you can actually get layers of meaning. This effect or this concept or idea forms the basis of our entire visual language of film. Using this idea of sequencing, together with editing is how we make compelling stories. When you add camera angles onto this, then those stories can become powerful. One of the most powerful camera angles that you can use is the close-up. Say for example you wanted to convey the idea of fear in your movie, you could show a character in a position of fear like this. But a much more effective use of visual language would be to cut to an extreme close-up, say, of the character's eyes. That's so much more effective because you are bringing the audience right up close to the character. If you just show the action or the emotion from far away, the audience would feel objective. They wouldn't really feel engaged. But by moving closer in, suddenly the audience feels like they're part of the action. One of the most compelling aspects of cinema or film in general is that we can identify with the characters on screen. Being part of the action really helps audience identification. Plus a really extreme close-up can create an uncomfortable or an intense effect. It can therefore heightened the intensity of any scene that you're filming. You can just think of that iconic shot from aliens where the character of Ripley has an encounter with the alien. That's an extreme close-up and it really works. The first time you see that, it's terrifying. In the next couple of videos, I'm going to take this idea a little bit further. I want to talk about composition and the rule of thirds, and how that's used in your storyboards. Then I'll also talk about some of the storytelling shots that are available to you as a board artist that you should know about and use in your work. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 19. The Principles of Composition for Storyboards: [MUSIC] Composition in film is so much more than just being how you make a strong or well composed image. We really tend to think of a good composition as being just about the pleasing order of elements within a frame. But as a storyboard artist, you're going to have to take that idea of composition much further and use it to tell the story in a more compelling way, rather than just simply illustrating the words of the dialogue. Here's what I'm talking about. We'll look at the rule of thirds. You've definitely come across this idea before. People are always talking about the rule of thirds, and you see it everywhere. You're told never put a subject in the center of the frame. You must always use the rule of thirds and put your subject off to the side. But the thing is, people rarely explain why this is so important. Here's why I think it's important or relevant to us as storyboard artists anyway. The structure of film and film narrative as we know it, certainly in the context of Hollywood cinema, it's a way of telling stories that was developed as far back as the ancient Greeks. That's really just to say that it's now pretty much ingrained in us as to how we read and understand and appreciate a good story. One of the very core things that characterizes this way of telling stories is that a good story has to have conflict. Now if you think about it, every film that you've ever seen in our Western tradition anyway, either has overt conflict between characters, or it has inner conflict within the main character. It's simply what drives the story or the narrative. It's at the heart of every story, and it's the thing that moves the story along towards resolution. It's why we watch films. We are interested to see how this conflict gets resolved. Now, this idea that's at the core of storytelling, I think relates to the rule of thirds because in an image or a shot, you have the opportunity to tell a story, let's call it a measure story. If you have a shot that has complete balance and evenness, say in a binary sense, then this is going to convey stability, a natural world order, it's going to convey normality and even convention. Whereas in a frame that has a slightly off-kilter composition is going to convey uneasiness, a dynamic quality. It might even convey adventure, and it will especially convey conflict, and a visually off-kilter framing or composition is in effect a division of thirds. Therefore, in this case, dividing your frame up into three becomes much more interesting than if you just had it divided into two. Now of course, you can definitely think of examples that go against this notion. There's many movies that focus on centrally framed compositions. I'm thinking immediately of the movies of Wes Anderson. He will put his subjects very much in the center of the frame. He uses binary setups a lot. But for the most part, just to go along with this idea, in nearly all the films that you can think of, the rule of thirds plays a huge role because visually, this rule disrupts the status quo, and it will make the composition much more interesting, and it will underscore or underline the narrative arc or the conflict that's at the heart of any narrative. Now to work with this idea in your storyboards, here's an example of how you might do it. You might have two characters talking, and you could present the dialogue scene like this. Here, you're essentially conveying on a subconscious level anyway, that these two characters are totally equal in their dynamic. [LAUGHTER] There's an equal distribution of power. But if you present the exact same scene like this, suddenly, you're showing the audience that this character here is more dominant, more powerful, and probably has power over this other character. Now there are many ways that you can play with this. You could even present a scene like this, or you could show it like this. But essentially, the way you frame your shots is going to give a subconscious idea or another layer of narrative meaning. Every time you draw a shot, you really need to be asking yourself, what's the story point in this scene? What is the underlying dynamic between the two characters that I'm working with or that I'm trying to draw? Then when you figure that out, use the rule of thirds to either play with that tension or to push it even further and to underscore that story point. If you work in this way, you'll be using composition as a powerful storytelling tool. 20. What Are Storytelling Shots: [MUSIC] Whenever you're story boarding a script, there are some standard go-to shots that you use, and we've covered some of them in our storyboard when we were building out the dialogue sequence in the saloon. In this lesson, we're going to go a little bit deeper into why these shots are so useful. There's what I call storytelling shots, or you can think of them as character-driven shots. If you remember, we use the point of view shot, that's when the camera is showing us something that a character is looking at. That can be either a direct shot of the object or the thing that he's looking at, or it can be an over the shoulder shot which keeps the character still in the frame but just a little bit off to the side in order to emphasize that the character is looking at something. Now, here's why the point of view shot or the over the shoulder shot is so powerful. In the last lesson, I talked about the rule of thirds, and I mentioned that one of the main constructs in storytelling is the idea of conflict. I explained my ideas around how the rule of thirds can underscore the idea of conflict in any story. All of our stories have to have that element of conflict in them which drives the story forward. Now, conflict always needs a hero and a villain. There is always a good versus evil element to conflict. That's the nature of conflict. One side believes that they are right, and because of that in every story there's a hero that we identify with. This is known as hero identification, it's usually just the main character of the film. For a story to work or to be compelling in any way to us as an audience, we need to be able to relate to or identify with the main character, even if that main character is flawed in some way. Or it's not overtly a hero like in a superman sense. Even with a flawed main character, we still have a relatable person going through a relatable story or situation. The two shots in cinema that are used to ensure that identification is driven home for the audience, or the close-up which I talked about before, and the point of view shot. The point of view allows us to almost see things from the very viewpoint or through the eyes of the character. That leads us to identify with him or her, or at least to see things from their point of view. Now I'm stating this as a very obvious thing right now, but in actuality it's a lot more subtle and sometimes it's even subconscious, but it is one of the most powerful visual storytelling techniques, so I really want you to be aware of it and to use it in your storyboards. This whole dialogue sequence between the sheriff and the barman could be played out using point-of-view shots between each of these characters. We could use an over the shoulder shot in nearly every panel. If you're using the point of view shot to show an object that the character is looking at, then what you want to do when you're boarding that out is always makes sure that you set it up first, you motivate that cut, and so, like I did in the storyboard, just have the two characters looking off screen before you cut to see what the action is that off-screen. 21. How to Use and Break the 180 Degree Rule: [MUSIC] The 180-degree rule is actually an essential convention for you to understand as a storyboard artist. I'm going to explain its application in the whole storyboarding process. In this lesson, I'm going to show you exactly what that rule is and also how you can break it. Essentially, the 180 degree rule states that a camera has to stay on one side of the action throughout any given scene. Let's look at an example of what this actually means. If you have two people talking and you're just roughing out an idea of how you would set up that shot, start off by drawing an imaginary line between the two characters. Now in order to maintain continuity and to make sure that all of your cuts will flow smoothly throughout the scene and coherently and make sense to the audience, you can use any camera setup that you like or any combination of shots that you like as long as you stay on this side of the line. This entire area is your safe zone. Another way of putting this, or a term that you might often hear, is that doing this will ensure that your characters maintain screen side. The red character over here will always be on the right-hand side of the screen. No matter what the shot is, if you cut to a close-up or an over the shoulder shot, that character will always be on the right and the blue character over here will always be on the left of any shot that you choose within your safe zone. Similarly, the over the shoulder shot or the two shot, you'll always have this blue character on the left. If you inserted a different shot within this dialogue scene from a different angle, say from over here, then all of a sudden the characters will be switched around in the frame and that effect is going to be jarring to the viewer. The audience is suddenly going to start asking themselves, what just happened? Did these two characters switch places? Or is it in a different location? Now, this is a very simple example, but it becomes even more important when you've got an action sequence taking place. Like imagine you've got a car chase and the car is moving at speed. Well, if you change the screen direction, suddenly the car, which was moving from left to right is suddenly going to appear that it's now going right to left, which is the opposite direction. Sometimes that's actually the effect that you want, especially if you've got a highly dramatic action sequence going on and you want to make it look even more chaotic, then you can break that 180-degree rule and it's going to work. But just bear in mind that for an effective cohesive flow of shots, try to keep to that 180-degree rule. Let's go back to the dialogue sequence. Because in something like this, you might actually want to move the camera for a specific reason and show the characters talking from a different angle, there's two really simple things that you can do. One of them is that you simply include a shot that leads the viewer's eye through a smooth transition. For example, you just cut back to a wide shot and you show one of the characters then walking across the screen to a new position and then you can cut back to your close-ups. That's going to read perfectly fine for the audience. The other way you could do it is just pan the camera, showing the audience exactly the screen direction that you are changing so pan it from one side of the room to the other. In terms of the 180-degree rule, it's always a good idea to sketch out a rough diagram to help you plot your action and your camera moves before you start to storyboard. Then you can get into the process of boarding your shots and you won't get lost or confused about where your line is. It will really help you to avoid making basic errors that will really jump out in your storyboard. Of course, like any rule or convention, it's there to be broken or disregarded altogether but always be clear about what you're doing and why and always remember what the story point is of your scene. 22. How to Draw Camera Moves on Your Storyboard: [MUSIC] The last thing that I want to walk you through in this class is camera moves. This can be quite tricky and quite a technical aspect of the storyboarding process. Up until now we've just focused on using straightforward pans and zooms, but I want to show you how to do some more complex moves and how they would look in the context of a storyboard. First up, let's cover the most common camera moves that you have in filmmaking like camera angles and cameras shots. Each of these cameras move should be used in order to underscore the story points at any given moment. Again ask yourself, what is the story point of the scene and how can I visualize it or show it in an interesting way? The first camera move that's the most common is the pan, and we use this one in our storyboard a lot. You draw it over two panels like this and you indicate the direction that the camera is panning. But just note that a pan is where the camera is static and it just simply moves on the tripod from one side to the other in order to take in the scene. You could have the exact same shot but where the camera itself actually moves from one position to the other and that's called a tracking shot. You could use that let's say when you're tracking alongside a character in the frame for example. Both are the same shot effectively in terms of how you would draw them on your storyboard, but in live-action there's a slight difference as to where the camera physically is when it's recording the shot. Another common pan is the diagonal pan and that's where you move the camera at an angle. To storyboard that or to draw it, what you do is put your frames around the area of the scene that you want the pan again to start and to stop that straightforward but in this case only put your red lines on the outside corners. That's just the convention of how to do a diagonal pan. After the pan you've got the tilt and again you draw it over two panels like this, even if you want to go from top to bottom or if you want to start at the bottom and move up to the top. A tilt is where the camera is static. It moves up and down to get the shot, but it stays in one point. Here I've indicated the start and stop positions with A and B. But if you wanted to have a camera move where the camera actually physically moves up or down, then that's often referred to as a jib or a boom shot. Again, it's the same shot in terms of how you would draw it. Just be aware that technically it's called a different name depending on whether the camera moves or not. Lastly, let's look at the zoom. This is where you start at far away and you move closer into your subject, or alternatively you start with a close-up and you move out. The arrows that you draw will indicate the direction that the move is going and you can also indicate your start and your end frames. A zoom is when the camera zooms closer in just with the lens, and a tracking is where the camera actually starts off in one position and physically moves closer into the subject or to the last frame. Again, both shots look the exact same on a storyboard. Let's take a quick look at an example of using all of these moves in one sequence. The first thing I want to do is just plan this out in thumbnail form. Let's say you've got a cityscape like this. You can have a pan along the street from left to right followed by a tilt or a boom up to this point, followed directly by a zoom or a tracking. That's all one shot basically with no cuts, but I've used three camera moves and four camera positions: A to B, up to C, and then the zoom into D. Now what do you do if you need to draw this on an actual storyboard template? Because the storyboard template doesn't seem to have that kind of option for creative cuts or creative camera moves. Well, you can simply move these panels around as you need to. What I'm going to do is just delete at these lines, then I'm going to select and grab this panel, drag it down and now I can draw that exact thumbnail out over these three panels and it works perfectly for that setup and sequence that I just thumbnailed. Just to give you an idea of what this might look like in context so that you know what I'm talking about, let's say this was part of a larger script. It could be something as simple as this. You've got a shot of a character walking down the street, maybe a close-up where he suddenly stops and realizes that he has to go upstairs to his apartment and then you could cut back to your pan, have them walking along. Maybe if he goes into the building you could have your camera moving up, and then when he gets into his apartment you could use your zoom in to the window. It's a very simple example, but I wanted to show you how you would use that in the context of a storyboard. 23. Your next Steps as a Storyboard Artist: [MUSIC] I mentioned before that the entire skill set of a storyboard artist can be divided up into three main areas; drawing skills, technical skills, and visual language. Now, if you focus on these three areas of your art and if you work to improve each one, then you'll be sure to develop a fully rounded and complete skill set for storyboarding. Your ability and your competency as a visual storyteller will only grow and become more sophisticated. I think that's how you develop talent. What are the next steps for you going forward? Here's what I want you to think about over the next couple of months; make a goal to create a portfolio of your story ideas. Now you can work on your own story idea, or you can use an existing script to develop visually. Your portfolio doesn't need to include a full length storyboard, I would aim to have 3-5 sequences that really showcase your ability to draw action, characters, dialog, and interesting presentation of shots and camera angles. Also, in your portfolio along with these sequences, include your thumbnail drawings as well as your ideation phase or your brainstorming phase. Also spend time each week to draw characters and scenes as standalone pieces alongside your finished board sequences. I'd also encourage you to spend time looking at other artist's work and draw as much inspiration from them as you can. Check out sites like ArtStation, if you don't know this one already. There are a lot of portfolio sites out there, but this one's really good, it has a really high level of professional standard. Of course, follow artists on Instagram, that's also very important. Lastly, if you're very keen on becoming a storyboard artist, I would really encourage you to study films as much as you can. A great exercise is to watch a movie and draw the shots as you're watching it. You might have to pause the film and sketch out your shots and then go back to watching it. But that's the best way to learn how established directors create their scenes and sequences. It's a great way for you to get good ideas for your own work. If you're interested in working for a studio, my advice is research the studios that you want to work for, follow them on all of their social platforms. Keep up-to-date with when they're hiring, even if it's just for internships. Stay up-to-date with them as much as possible. If you wanted to try to get work as a freelancer storyboard artist on smaller independent projects, consider making a profile on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. All you really need is that first job, and then once you get that, everything else will flow from there. Above all, my top piece of advice is, be patient, stay engaged with your work and your process and focus on drawing as much as you can. I promise you, the rest will fall into place. All that's left for me to say now is thank you so much for watching this class. Thanks for being with me here today. I really hope that you learned something, that you are inspired to take this knowledge and use it to further your career and your creative goals. Let me know if you've got any questions or if you'd like feedback or advice on your work. I'll be looking out for you in the project section, and hopefully, in the next class that we do together. [MUSIC]