Storyboarding for Filmmakers and Content Creators: For Non-Drawers

1. Introduction: In The Beginning...: [MUSIC] Storyboarding filmmaker. [MUSIC] Hello and good day from good old Australia. My name is Carl and I'd like to say a big old thank you for joining me on a storyboarding adventure. Now before we kick it off and get elbow deep into storyboarding, I thought I might give you the why this course exists in the first place. Let me take you back to good old 2017. [NOISE] The idea for the course all started back in 2017, where I was an art department assistant for a sci-fi short film. I was jacked, pumped mega excited to sit in on my first production meeting. After some initial introductions, the meeting began. I sat there in excitement and anticipation. Yeah. The first assistant director opens up discussion with the cinematographer, so exciting. Scene one exterior the beach. Sorry, I forgot to mention, he's Scottish. Derick looks out at the sunset as Aaron confronts them on the beach. The cinematographer spoke. Let's start with a what and close-up on Derick then a reverse close-up on Aaron. Gripping stuff. Cinty in Nate apartment, Lisa sits in the shadows as Derick furiously drunk enter the apartment, back over to the cinematographer. Let's start with a wide and close-up on Derick and then a reverse close-up on Lisa. At this point, my initial excitement started to fade, were we just going to go through every scene and just write down a shortlist? The rest of the meeting float on the same. When I stepped out after two hours, I felt the joy sucked right out of me. I thought there's got to be a better way. Surely drawing out some rough storyboards would have been a more creative and fun way to build a shortlist. [MUSIC] That's when I started to dig. Turned out lots of famous directors and filmmakers create their own storyboards. Somehow I needed to spread the word. [MUSIC] Attention to all filmmakers, you must start to storyboard. After a quick trip back to the old drawing board, I came up with a new plan, background and illustration, check. Experience as a classroom teacher, fork chisel. Unnecessarily checklist, [FOREIGN]. Let some [FOREIGN]. [MUSIC]. This is where my part of the story takes a bit of a backseat and your part of the story begins. I hope you really enjoy your learning experience and I wish you the best of luck completing this course. Go get them dagger. [NOISE]. [MUSIC]. 2. Getting Started: Gear You Need To Get Started: [MUSIC] With pencils, if you took a walk into your local art supply joint, you'll notice there's quite a range of pencils to choose from. Basically, they're all good, but my suggestion would be a moderate priced, good old, number 2 pencil. What we call here, [inaudible] an HB pencil. Really cheap ones are a bit rough and have nasty habits in the lead or the lead breaks constantly. You want to go just a one step above your basic free pencil. A good pencil should pull smoothly across the page and achieve full pack, a Staedtler or Faber Castell or any other non-off-brand of HB number 2 pencil will do the trick. If you feel like buying something fancier, go for it. Let me warn you. Blunt pencil lines are not cool. Be sure to always keep that pencil sharp. A trick to keep the pencil sharper longer is to rotate the tips between strokes [inaudible] smooth. Also, make sure to grab yourself [NOISE] a pencil sharpener too. Paper is a similar scenario like pencils, where you can just about use anything. The best is something with a reasonably smooth finish, but not so smooth that it smudges easily. The reason being is you want to pull the lead across the page without too much friction. Sketch pads with a rough finish are not so great, and the rough surface dulls your pencil very quickly. So my suggestions for paper are the following. If at a desk, A4 copy-type paper is all good. Just grab yourself a cheap realm and go nuts. You don't want to go bigger than an A4 as keeping the drawing small, keeps it fast and rough, rather than large pieces of finished up. A flat page works better than a book. As you don't have to fight with the edge or the fold or the binder of the pad. If your desk is lumpy, a solution is to get a craft mat or a DIY piece of cardboard or thin wood. On a train in transit or around about, is a great time to draw too, so any kind of notepad that has a hardback that prevents a paper from bending is the cat's pajamas. Again, you want one with a smooth finish, so grab the one that is least coarse, least rough if you can. I've also seen lots of artists use clipboards with a sheet of paper attached. That's another great option for portability. [NOISE] Pens can be fun to use too. There are heaps of different styles of pens that create a whole range of effects. It's great fun experimenting with them and it can add a whole other level to your drawings. Like pencils, they're relatively cheap. It can be picked up anywhere that sells stationary or art supplies. A good ballpoint pen is your go-to. Just like with pencils, there's just one or two steps up from the cheapest version. You don't really need a ruler. As we're going to learn some techniques to get them beautiful, straight fluid lines, and natural. If you do really want to clean up your pencil [inaudible], apart from your normal eraser, there's something even cooler, which is called a kneaded eraser. A kneaded. This looks like blue Tack or whatever you call it in your [inaudible] and can be molded into a point to erase little bits and pieces or any shape you desire. It also doesn't leave them crumbly lumps of rubber on your page. Now one last thing you'll need is a sweet little pencil case to keep your art case safe. So to wrap it all up, the gear you'll need for this course is a pack of HB pencils or number 2s, a pencil sharpener, a cheap realm of A4 copy paper or similar, and an A4 drawing pad. Now, it is art. Feel free to express yourself in any way. Your assignment to be completed within the next 24 hours, is to assemble your drawing kit. [inaudible]. Lift a few bits and pieces from work or wrap [inaudible] or head to your local art stationery supplier. [NOISE] Buy. If you find any really cool gear that you like drawing with and you reckon it's worth recommending, let me and your classmates know. Good luck. [MUSIC] 3. 3 Things to improve your drawing skills: [MUSIC] Now you have the gear, it's time to learn a few new drawing techniques. By learning these techniques, you will boost your confidence and enjoyment which will pave the road to your progress. [BACKGROUND] If you watch any professional, what they do looks effortless. If you watch a professional illustrator, it's the same, it's fluid, and it's carefree. Our focus is achieving fluid lines. Let's ditch the ferry lines for something more than Brazilian. Think of it like handwriting. Big handwriting is hard work to read. The cleaner lines you draw, the better you'll be able to describe and express your emotions and ideas. [BACKGROUND] When I first started to use these techniques, I did find it took me a while to get used to it. My drawings actually turned out worse to begin with and at the time, I honestly felt pretty discouraged. Please don't be too hard on yourself in the beginning and try and stick with it. Let's take a quick look at three things that will help improve your drawing today. Number 1, drawing from the arm. From all our years of handwriting in school, we tend to use a wrist for drawing. Unfortunately, this limits our ability to create fluid lines. Instead of using our wrist to draw, we want to use the full potential of our arm. We can draw just from the elbow or the entire arm from the shoulder. We want to lock our wrist into a comfortable position, gently rest down hand on the page, and using either our elbow, or full arm, smoothly draw a line across our page. For drawing more complex shapes like the dreaded circle, you want to use your whole arm. It's important to try and stay as loose as a goose. Do not tense up. When you need to create small details, it's totally fine to revert back to drawing with your wrist. Number 2, ghosting. Ghosting is basically just having a quick practice of your drawing part. It's like a practice swing that a baseball player or golfer would do before actually striking the ball for real. A simple way to practice is drawing two points on your paper. Take a couple of quick practice strokes then commit to the page. Have a crack at drawing a circle by doing a couple of practice loops, then choose I'm circle. You can also have a go at multiple points. Number 3, rotating your page. The most comfortable way our moves to draw a straight line is diagonally from bottom to top. To get straight lines that align with the edge of the page, don't be afraid to rotate your page to take advantage of the natural motion of your arm. This, of course, will become helpful later when drawing the frames for your storyboards. To recap, the top three things you can practice to improve your drawing techniques are drawing from the arm, ghosting, and rotating your page. A good way to practice is just to draw some primary shapes like circles, squares, and triangles and practice drawing those long straight fluid lines. But the best way to practice is to do it for real. If you [NOISE] want to start knocking out some thumbs for one of your projects, I would say, go for it. We're going to start diving into how to draw characters and compositions so you'll get a chance to use these techniques in the upcoming videos. [MUSIC] 4. Drawing the Head: The thing we'll probably be drawing most in our storyboards is our characters. Let's take a look at how we can draw a simplified human form. As a child, we naturally draw the human torso as a shape rather than a stickman. A drawings are also relatively abstract, but earn a bad representation of the human form. Let's unlock that inner child again. Hey I never asked you. Yeah. Do you like guacamole? [NOISE]. By creating abstract people to use in our storyboards. Starting with the human head, one of the most important bits of information we need to describe is where are our characters looking? We're going to translate a more detailed version of the face down into a simple oval to represent the head and a T-shape to represent the nose and brow, or a couple of key features. This will give us a simple way to describe the characters look direction. For instance, if a character is front on, we can describe that as a T shape of the nose and the brow. From the side, we can draw the nose and the eye as a simple triangle. From the three-quarter view, we simply shift the T-shape to the side. To start with draw an oval that represents your character's head. Place the brow line just a little above the horizontal center of the head. Then draw a vertical line that is about half the size of the head and length from the brow. This represents the character's nose. If a character is looking down, we need to shift the brow line down past halfway. If our character is looking up, we do the opposite and shift the brow line and vertical line up. If they are looking to the side, we shift the T-shape to the side. The T-shape works when the character is facing the camera. But what if they were looking away? What we can do is draw a triangle shape to represent the nose and place it to the side of the head. Now, it would only be the tip of the nose, we would see as the rest of the nose will be obstructed by the face. Then we can finish it off with a simple C-shape just off the center to represent the ear. If we draw that into a frame and add some shoulders, we now have a medium T-shape of two characters interacting with each other, similar to this scene from The Godfather. [MUSIC] Why not draw the features of the face? The answer is, of course, you can. these are your storyboards, so feel free to add whatever detail to your characters you like. Unfortunately, however, I won't be teaching you how to draw a more detailed heads and features in the short-course for two reasons. Number 1, the purpose of drawing storyboard thumbs, its not about creating pieces of art, but brainstorming your ideas. Personally, when doing my own storyboard thumbs, I don't bother drawing the features. Instead I focus on expressing mode through staging, composition, and light. Number 2. Learning to draw the human form is pretty complex and time-consuming. Stan Prokopenko, an amazing out-of-state. In reality is, it takes much longer commonly between 5 to 10 years of proper training to reach a level of drawing proficiency. But don't let that discourage you. You can do it. If you're interested in learning more about drawing, I'll share some links for free and paid online courses and tutorials that are worth checking out if you've caught the drawing bug. Now, let's push on to the rest of the body. 5. Drawing the body: [MUSIC] When drawing figures, it's super helpful to have a rough idea of the proportions of the human body. Now proportions can be anything [NOISE] and get pretty complex but we're going to cover off on just the important ones for your average adult. Using the head as a unit of measurement, the average adult is between 7.5 and eight heads high. Starting from the top, the shoulders start just under the seven head mark about one third of a head down, the shoulders are also about 2.5 heads too. Next, the naval or the waist, it's found at the fifth head mark and just a little smaller than the width of the shoulders. The crotch sits at four heads at the center of the body, just below the crotch is where the gap for the leg start, which is the edge of the butt. This one is important as it's where the inner leg starts, the knees end at the second head mark and when both together are about one head unit wide. Heading up to the arms you'll notice the elbows sits about halfway down the arm and lines up with naval at five heads. The wrist lines are closely with the crotch and the tips of the fingers rest about halfway down the thigh. From the side view, you notice how the spine curves and the chest pushes out past the head. Let's translate that into a simple and straightforward. Why this shape? Well, a silhouette reads well from any scale within the frame. It's also used in architectural drawings, in film, and video game concepts to give us hints of scale or just to say, hey there's people flying around here. [NOISE] Let's get drawing. We start by drawing the head, the next establish the shoulders with a line. Remember the shoulders are just under the head and are about 2.5 heads wide. We're going to create a box which represents the torso which is about three heads high. Before drawing the legs it's handy to do a quick measure as to where the feet rest, which is about four heads under the torso. [MUSIC] The feet are about half a head long. Lastly let's do the arms. For now we'll just do them resting at the side. The elbows are going to be about halfway down the torso with the hands resting above the middle of the thigh. When drawing the feet, the direction they point helps to sell which way the body is facing. [MUSIC] From the basic human silhouette you can make all kinds of your own variations, you could add a long dress, you can squash it down to create the child character. You can make it even more basic, this will be handy if the subject is really small in the frame or you have a crowd you wanted to draw or you can [inaudible]. Howdy stranger? Just remember to roughly stick to those general proportions for the head, shoulders, torso, the legs, and the two arms. Disclaimer. Once we start moving the arms and hands we start creating gestures. Now just a drawing is another discipline all in itself and takes quite a while to master. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to cover it in the short course but I can show you how to draw the arms and hands. If you're interested in learning about just drawing, I have provided some course recommendations. With drawing the arm gestures sometimes it's easier to draw the hands first. If you think about it, the arms actually follow the hands [MUSIC] other times it's easier to start with the arm if the character is pointing for instance. With gestures we can exaggerate the line of the arm to help sell the character's pose. Creating gestures with the arms, is a simple way to express what your character's feeling and can be lots of fun to experiment with. If you get stuck with how the arm gesture should look, simply use yourself as a reference by striking a pose in front of the mirror at home. We've got some ultra basic looking people we can draw. Now it's time to turn them into characters and use the language of cinema to tell a story within the frame. [MUSIC] 6. Drawing wide angle shots: [MUSIC] Just like film, it's important we create the illusion of 3D space in our storyboards. We can do this by establishing depth, by using perspective. Perspective basically means making objects appear closer or further away. These are small, but the ones out there are far away. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Small, far away. [LAUGHTER] There is a couple of rules and tricks we should know that will make our wide shots look their best. The great starting point for our wide shots which will help with establishing depth is where we draw the horizon line. [MUSIC] It's important we correctly place and scale our characters against our horizon line. If we don't, they can appear as though they're buried in the ground or floating off into the space. [NOISE] Let's start by placing the horizon line and a character smack bang in the center. [MUSIC] Now, if we wanted to draw a second character further away, they would appear smaller. But why would they appear smaller? Let's do a little bit of science, shall we? [MUSIC] Let's draw a quick frame with the horizon in the center again and tuck in two characters. [MUSIC] One we can see their whole body, and the other who is closer to the camera we can just see from their shoulders to their knees. Let's now draw the setup from the side view to see what's going on. The camera would be parallel to the ground, we would have one character close to the camera. The camera's field of view would be like cutting off their head and lower legs. Then we would have our second character further from the camera. [MUSIC] Let me grab another color. Notice how the second character's proportion in the camera's field of view roughly matches the proportion in the frame, same with the character closest to the camera. Let's do another one with the camera very close to the ground, tilt upwards creating a low angle shot. One character in the distance again, and one close to the camera where we can just see their feet and legs. [MUSIC] Let's draw the camera setup from the side again. [MUSIC] Camera low to the ground, character close to the camera. [MUSIC] Let's get their field of view, and let's place the second character. [MUSIC] Again, we can see both characters' proportion in the camera's field of view is also reflected in our frame. What we can also see is why we see just the feet and the legs of the character in the foreground while at the same time see the whole of the character in the background. When I first started doing storyboards I would often do a quick scribble of the camera setup from the side view with the field of view and the characters, just like we just did. I found it helped me figure out what position they need to be in and how big they were in the frame. right exercise if your people are looking a little weird in the frame, so I would definitely have a crack of it until you get a bit more of the feel about where they need to sit. Back into drawing people. We know why objects appear smaller when further away and bigger when closer, but what position do our characters need to be in the frame? Where are they meant to live in the frame? There's an easy rule for that, if it's a one point perspective shot for example like a Wes Anderson or Stanley Kubrick film, the horizon line is center frame. When drawing our characters we need to line up their center with the horizon line, like so. [MUSIC] If it's a low angle shot, the horizon line would be low in the frame. Our characters' feet or ankles would line up with the horizon line. [MUSIC] For a high angle shot, the horizon line would be high in the frame with our characters' heads all lining up with the horizon line. [MUSIC] There are three tricks for creating depth which can be done with characters and objects. The first one we've already covered is scale. Objects that are comparatively smaller appear further away, while larger objects appear closer. For a tree to appear closer, we need to draw it comparatively larger than the other trees. The next is overlapping objects. When objects partially overlap other objects, we perceive them as closer than the covered objects. In this example, we make the trees appear further away by drawing them behind the other trees. The last one is vertical placement. We perceive objects that are placed lower in the image as closer to us, and objects that are placed higher as being further away. This tree is scaled down but also higher in the frame than the other trees, making it appear much further away. [MUSIC] Now we have an understanding of perspective, let's draw some wide angle shots. 7. Drawing wide angle shots: Live drawing session: Let's do some reference drawing. the first place we're going to start is we're going to look at our reference image, figure out things like where the horizon line is, where the people sit, and then we're going to try and draw that on the blank canvas on the left. Let's kick it off. Whereabouts is the horizon line? Let's do that to start with. This one is pretty straightforward, it's right across here, of course. Where are people standing? I got this stick. Now he's a tiny bit bigger in the frame than this guy. I guess, they want to look a little bit more powerful, I suppose in the frame. Let's have a go drawing that over on the left. Cut our horizon line about here. They both touches just below their waists. If his hand was down, it would probably be touching there too, just like we learned before. Probably legs are out there, and his head maybe here, so we've got his body, we've got his legs, and then we've got his arms. Then we've got our friend over here. He's a little bit higher in the frame, a little bit bigger. His legs. Probably doing it a bit bigger than the actual image there. That's okay, we're just emphasizing it a bit. We've got his legs too. That's those two guys in the frame. We're going to put other things going on, like the road and stuff. This is something where I want to introduce to you to something called the vanishing point, same perspective, all lines converge to this one spot, especially when they want point perspective. You'll notice that the road, goes here as well. The lines on the right, edge to the road. Even the top of the fence goes down there, and this is our vanishing point. If we wanted to draw the road in, we can figure out, let's say the vanishing point's there and another road goes behind them and behind them, where it goes behind this guy too. Then with the lines going down the road, beep, beep, beep. We can also do the fences. What we'll do is we'll do the what we did at the top of the fences. That was pretty good. I'm going to rotate the canvas. There we go. Some cozy you can do in Photoshop. Then we can do the fences. Just a few other details on the background, telephone poles. But it's meant to look sparse anyway. If you want to emphasize the characters a little bit, just shade them in, got a bit more. We could do this fade pointing as well so they were kind of looking at each other, and I the hip direction if you like. Cool. That's pretty rough, isn't it? If we hand it to someone, they might not know what the heck that means, so it's always good to do a few notes. We'll call this road and big sky. Cool. Let's try another one. Down here. Probably this one because its composition is pretty interesting. Again, we'll [inaudible] with our horizon line, it's probably look great about here. We can see because it's quite low, it just touches his ankles because the cameras were really low to the ground. You can see the bottom of his fit there. He's got the same ankles, even though his sitting down still the same. Let's draw this fella. We'll start with our horizon line, it's low about there. We'll just block out this guy's feet. Say like there. We've got some legs moving up. Just a little bit of a foot, like a shoes, put on a jacket. Cool. We've got the legs and the jacket, and then we've got this dude in the background. We haven't really gone over how to draw someone sitting down, but basically they're all the same, Let's have a look at this picture. We still got the hip on there. We've got the body, that doesn't change size. The only thing that's changed is the upper leg's missing but we do have the lower leg which remains the same size. There he is on his chair. His ankles and his feet should be the same on the horizon line as the guy standing up. Let's give him some arm. Then we've got this dude hanging over top of him. If you like, if you want to show his body position, it's tilted away like this. Then we can do some things going down, and he's looking down, I'll put a little bit of a look. Then if we want to do a bit more detail, we can show something like the box here, which is connecting this table. There's all stuff going on in the background. to create a bit of depth, but it's not super-duper important. The main thing is the framing, I think between where the character sit between the legs here. I don't know if this is going to make sense to anybody or even me like a couple of days. What I'm going to do is write a note. It's a trench coat and this is feet. Just to make sense. This thing, box/table. Cool. Great. Let's go into something a little bit more [inaudible] Should we give him a bit of a chair? Maybe some. There we go. Got another scene from Road to Perdition, is that what it said? I think so. Let's figure out where the horizon line is. It looks like it's above the middle because I can see everybody's heads basically on the same line, which is a giveaway to where the horizon line, that's too low, horizon line is. A little bit higher than that. I can't go get her out. Let's try again. Neck here, neck there, neck there. Pretty close. Look, we have at the top there. We'll have the vanishing point. Probably be on there, maybe here. Let's see if I've got this right. Then see these lines. Cool. Let's have a crack at drawing this guy. Horizon line, not quite matching up. Doesn't matter. Let's start blocking at these guys out there. Say, his feet are out there. What would stick their head just above the horizon line. That one guy there, we'll just do [inaudible] actually. Then the another guy, he's a little bit smaller in the frame. He's a bit higher up. Remember, higher in the frame means further away. Let's go do a simple blocking for this one. We've got another guy over here holding the umbrella. Similar keys, about the same as this one. Like this one. Super rough drawings for the three. We've got another guy. He's below down the frames that he's actually close at camera. He's probably on a bit the same line as this guy. [inaudible] again. We've got this other guy over here. Where's the other boy? He's the highest, so he's on there further back. He's crashed a little bit though. Anyways. Let's put him there. He's doing some crazy ninja stuff. [inaudible] Then the last guy on the right here, he's a little bit higher in the frame than these guys, so we put his feet probably about there. They're super-duper abstract looking people. If you wanted to add a little bit more detail, which would probably be good. The scene's showing it's a dead end, so their stuck in the alley. Let's do at the bottom into the street. I'll have the buildings so they're going all the way up to the edge so you can see them. Then we've got this one here, we could figure out with the street, but that's a bit here. It's not quite right, is it? It's a bit higher. [inaudible] There's a old timely car, beep, beep, in the background there, beep, beep. A little pole. Put in a few things to make it look like there's something at the end of that street. Cool. Then we'll go to all this rain on ground, make a few a bit of lines there. Cool. If we wanted to sell it a little bit more, we could remove some of these. Let's get rid of the horizon line. We don't need that anymore. That would line up all the the characters. That'll give us a bit more of a feel of how the scenes looking. Cool. My last turn, it's probably good to do a few notes so people know what these things are, or when you go back to it in a week or two, figure out what was I doing? Dead end. Street. Sweet. Let's push on to the next one. This one's a little bit different as our characters doesn't really cut through the horizon line. He's quite low in the frame because he is a little compared to the rest of it. I'm just going to make a guess instead of horizon lines. In the middle or is it lower? Let's see. Maybe it's actually lower in the frame. About there. Cool. Now, one of the cool things about this shot, is we can see the way they have set up the hills is actually pointing to Mr. Bond. See how he flies down, *****. It's a nice little [inaudible] not that one quite, but it draws the eye down to where he is. Just cool. Even the roads point to him. Even this hill is, which is gravy. Anyway, let's do some drawing. Let's get the horizon line happening so we see where everything is. But see the vanishing point here. Let's draw it over here. Let's not smack bang in the middle this time. This is where we can cut a line up our road, given that's does snake off afterwards. Snaky snaky. Here we've got Mr. bond. Let's draw a little character in the middle here. Probably a little bit higher up there, isn't he? That's okay. Then we've got his car. Then we've got these lovely mountains. We want to make sure these mountains point down towards the man, lead the eye towards him. [inaudible]. I might get rid of the horizon line again like we did in the last one. Looks a little bit more clear. You can see what's going on. We've got another hill. [inaudible] Even the creek's got a leading, leading your eye to him. Easy-peasy. I'll give him a bit of color, and the car takes a bit. Going to stick out in the frame. Here we've got lots of clouds. Let's do a couple of notes. Bond, just the way everything is. Car. This is a road. Mountain and mountain. This is all heavy cloud. Sweet. Let's have a look at the next one. Cool. Classic Western. What I really like about this one, it's got that cool triangular composition. We've got this guy, he's looking at that guy. That guy. Most defined by where their feet are. Noise. I might just get rid of this one. Let's figure out where the horizon is, how let's say. Looks like all their heads match up, so it must be high on the frame. This is the horizon line. We got our main character. Let's make it a little big. Head, shoulders, got his waist, legs, and his feet are swayed out. Now I'm going to draw his cape because it looks cool. It's triangularly shaped. We go to the second guy. I wonder if it would help to draw the hair. Let's say we've got here, here. Further composition a little bit. Cool. Saying our second guy is about here. Their feet it's on the bottom of that triangle. Let's draw his body. He's got some leggys. The last guy, he's actually more like all the way down here. Then the background got the wall. It's got some tombstones, [inaudible] horizon, and a bit of a mountain range. Again, we'll write some notes. Graveyard. Cool. Let's push on to the next one. Let's start with the horizon line. There's a little bit of a cheat to finding it sometimes. You'll notice as things sit on the horizon line, they appear straight or parallel. For instance, these two lines are parallel. But you'll notice when you get down to the bottom, they start becoming quite diagonal like the line of the floor. It gets more extreme the further it comes from the horizon line. We know the horizon line's here because these two lines are parallel. If we cut across here, that's basically where the horizon line sits. Let's start by blocking out some of the things in the frame like the wall. Just before center, because that will help us figure out where our character is. We'll shove in the horizon line, so now to place our characters. Our first character is standing in the frame about here. Legs, arms. They appear a little bit lower in the frame because, of course, they're sitting down. Now, she's standing on a step, so she's probably about on the same plane as them or maybe a tiny bit lower. Let's draw them. Let's draw back of the chair maybe, and we'll draw her. She's a little bit lower in the frame. Now what we might do is just draw a few things that are in the image to try and sell it a little bit better, so we can figure out what's going on there because that's not really giving us as much info, is it? What I'm going to do is draw a door, comes down to her waist. Maybe the floor plane that accompanies the door. We've got a few cool light lines leading to her with the shadows and stuff. I might put that in the end and around. We have the steps are coming down. Got a bit of a plan here, I would have put that in there, and then give it a bit of depth. I want this color hair in so she stands out. These guys too, they're serving as characters in the frame. Let's do that wall, it's coming down. The stairs along here a little bit. I will do the second wall because it's' blocking off the characters. We went to the table too. We could probably also do the ceiling, a little bit of the ceiling. In one point perspective, one thing you notice is that the vertical lines go straight up and down, and the lines that are horizontal, along the y-axis, go left to right. The only lines that are on a diagonal are those that go and point towards the vanishing point or point towards the horizon on the top or the bottom planes, for instance, the roof or the floor. Sitting at table. Hiding from view. Cool. So now it's your turn. Dive down the rabbit hole, and find some of your own reference shots. Have a go at deconstructing some famous compositions, and don't forget your horizon line and where to place your characters in the frame. 8. Drawing medium shots: One of the most important shots for expressing the emotion and connection of our characters is the medium shot. It's incredible Sam. I can't tell you how excited I am. We'll start by breaking down a few different types of medium and medium close-up shots and how we can add them to our storyboards. Let's start by looking at our single shot. We've got two shots here. We've got one that's a low-angle shot and we got a high-angle shot. The first one at the top is the high-angle shot. One thing I want to show you is how you can tell the difference and how you can help draw that in your storyboards to try and to find whether the camera is up or down. First of all, we'll look at is we can see, it's tricky to see, but basically the floor, it's running along here. We can just see the coronary which is running down. We can see the other full pain. As you'll notice, the character is right directly smacked bang in the middle of that. Very similar here, but this time the camera is placed low and is looking up. That's why we can see the ceiling plane on this one. This one we've got a ceiling pitch here, control stray, corner of the world going down and then we've got this line across here. We got our ceiling here and then our floor here. When we go to draw these characters, you'll notice that you can come up with them anywhere, and it's really hard to tell what angle the camera is in. Let's say we throw around. Here is going to shoulders come out. How do we know if the camera is high on? Same here, where are the cameras? What we could do is we can identify where the ceiling or the floor is, and that really helps tell the shot. Remember it's the shape here. We're going to do that here as well then into the room coming down. All of a sudden that makes it feel like it's a high-angle shot. We do the same here is we'll apply the roof. What we'll do is we won't have it so at the corner of the wall and roof here, we're going to shift it behind. Let's make a slight different composition. The corner of the room, find it here. The reason they tend to place the subjects in these three lines is that it draws the viewer's eye to that person and emphasizes the character. You'll see it all the time. Just to summarize, if you want to draw a high-angle shot, it's important to show the floor. The same goes for the low-angle shot, except we need to show the ceiling. All we need to do is draw the lines where the floor meets the wall or the ceiling meets the wall. To make the composition interesting, you can include the vertical line where the two walls meet. Let's have a look at the classic cowboy medium shot. The frame has a camera parallel to the ground and we'll start by figuring out where the horizon line is. Let's block him in. Let's hit direction in, let's place the shoulders. Then we'll go this way, his legs spy off to the side, which kind of neat actually. Then of course, being a cowboy shot, he's holding his piece, his gun. I really like this guy, he is really cool. Then we can put in some of the background. Here's a more modern take on the cowboy shot. I don't have any even when I see Samuel L Jackson. I just can hear him screaming. This one is more of a low-angle cowboy shot. It's a little bit more dynamic. We can see again how we can see the roof plane, so we know that it's a low-angle shot. I've lined it up with a secondary character. Now this one will be tricky. You know how we have to line up the horizon line with a body part of the character to match the right scale with the other characters. The problem with this one is the line for the horizon is probably quite low. It's probably the thigh or something or legs, that might be his legs. That's his thigh there and plus it's tilted a little bit and we'll say, that's where he stand. The property will line up about there. We just imagine where the horizon line is with this one. Let's draw the roof and the ceiling. Draw that line coming down. One character in the corner there. Going up in a way. We've got that poor fella on the chair where life isn't really going too well for him, right in the second. Then we've got Sam. It's probably good to pick. [inaudible] he's got his gun here. Cool. When you've got multiple characters in the scene, sometimes it's tricky to identify who is who. Quite often, what you would do is you'd probably shade in the characters just to help identify who is who. Let's say that's Sam we show him in gray. Just so I can see who is who. Make it a little bit darker. Now we might even leave him white. You notice these other things in the scene that are important, like the door, for instance, you notice these all point towards people in the frame. It's going to give it some leading lines to push into our characters. Which is cool. Maybe I can put the door in. Still one and two. These leading lines. It frames in the show, which is cool. I like how I've done it. Even more leading lines here for the shelves. That one is a medium cowboy shot. What we can see, our lead character, our hero is good. Let's take a look at another one. We got a classic two-shot, a shot, and a reverse shot. Let's start by seeing if we can identify the floor plans at all to see if it's a low or high shot. This one you can see, we don't have the edge of the floor plane, but you can see the horizontal lines across which to tell us where the floor is. It's pretty high, but we can just identify that is like a line off here. If that was a wall in the background, we can see the floor plane. Let's say that is actually a hotshot. Where's this one? It's a low shot from your perspective. We can see there's no roof there, we can't see the floor plane, but we can see the roof. Let's try and block out this shot a little bit. What we might do is just identify that floor plane again because it helps a bit. The beauty about the two-shot, of course, is that it connects your characters together. Shoulders. You can see how she's slanted to the side. Her weight's rolling on one side. It just makes for more interesting composition, so that's why I slant her shoulders a tiny bit too. Then we have him. Their eye lines matching as nearly on the same lines that will give us a good guide to where we should put the head. I will actually start with the shoulders first. Look at the shoulders, and then the head. That goes for this [inaudible]. I might just carry these lines, so he stands out a bit more [inaudible] and just to identify that's actually the back of his head, give him a little bit of an ear. That can tell us it's the back of his head. Here, we can just put another look direction, so we can tell she's looking at him. Now we've got the return shot. See that leading line of the building behind him. What we'll do is we'll give her a little hat, bare I think because it is cool. Let's start with him first. He's about here. The shoulders. In here, it's nearly taken the whole frame. It cuts down on the frame. Let's try it again. A little bit too high in the framework. What's wrong with her shoulders. Her shoulders are like outstretched here and then give her a little barrier, so we know where she is looking [inaudible] direction. Now to identify where the floor is, the edge of the floor helps. I can tell this is a high shot and the one below , shot from below. The only thing I can notice in the shot is something in-between both of our characters here. Obstruction between them. It's not clear which I reckon are part of the composition. Let's put the sign in the background and let's see that big pole really obstructing the two of them. The line is well. That's a little bit hard to determine which characters, which at the moment, and then it's a shot, reverse shot. Let's go ahead and shade them in, so we can differentiate them. What we might do is color him in, [inaudible] Here we go. A bit more foam. Then we'll color them in here as well. Who is who? This color looks funny. What's color? Secondary person and another color, just so you see who is who. Let's start by drawing a character, Harry line strangely on the ground want. Let's draw in the ground. [inaudible] the distance just looking up at the camera. Then we'll get our agents in this one. Let's start by drawing in the roof. There's a slight tilt to the camera, which is cool. Then we've got our agents standing in the frame, on there. [inaudible] shoulders, body. You see how his shoulders go that way and this one that way. We can see who is the most important person in this scene. It's the person who's the biggest or the highest in the frame, and then we can block in a few things like a small cubicle here. We can do their legs [inaudible] and will do a look direction to get the slide here to what they are looking at. [inaudible] I've got these lights. Cool. Now that look pretty lost in the frame, I might do what I did last time. Just to bring them down a bit. To recap, a few things to include in your medium shots are, number one when creating a high angle shot, identify the ground and for the low angle shot, thus ceiling. Number two, differentiate our characters by shading them in different tone or colors. Number three, incorporate leading lines into your frames. 9. Creating camera movement: Camera movement, it's one of the most expressive tools available in video production. Naturally we want to express these ideas on our thumbnails too. We want to add a sense of forward momentum, pace, and energy to keep our audience engaged. Let's not leave out the important tool of camera movement. Let's add some of those arrows and squares. [NOISE] [MUSIC] Let's have a look at some camera movements and how we draw them in our storyboards. Let's kick it off with the zoom. Let me scribble. It seems pretty easy. This is for arrows one on each corner pushing in the direction you want to zoom. For instance, an arrow going in here, one arrow there, [NOISE] another one there, and another one there. Now of course, if we want to zoom out, let's put this zoom. If we want to zoom out, same scenario. Just the arrows going that way. [NOISE] Cool. Now say we want it to zoom on something specific in the frame. It wasn't just sent straight into the frame. Let's draw a dude here. Hey dude this is his eyes, that's his shoulders. We want to zoom right into his face. What we'll do is we draw with a frame. Then let me get rid of these. [NOISE] We basically just draw the arrows here. [NOISE] [MUSIC] So the end result would probably look something like this. Next thing we have is going to be the pan rotating the camera up from the left to the right or the right to left. Simply breezy. We're just going to do a nice big arrow going from right to left. That would be pan to the right. Then of course the other way pan left. Easy-peasy. Next one we have is the tilt. Rotating the camera up or down. Two arrows on the side. Saying tilt up and for down [NOISE] arrows pointing down. Tilt up and tilt down. Cool. Next we have the dolly or the push in or pull out. That's when you physically grab the camera and you move it forwards or backwards. We'll call it dolly, that's got a couple of names. With the dolly basically what you're going to do is make the arrows a bit thicker. It's just like the zoom except big arrows. [inaudible] Got to draw the arrow properly. Now, it's perfectly all right if they actually look the same as the zoom, as long as you write down the bottom what it actually is so people know it's zoom, let's do that right now. Push in and pull out. Cool. Next one is going to be truck. That's when we use our big strong muscles and we actually pick up and we move the camera from left to right physically, we do it, actually or rotate it. That one's super easy. It's just instead of one arrow like the pan, it's just two arrows. [NOISE] I nearly wrote pan there. I want to put truck. Then of course the other way. The arrow is this way. This truck. Left, too easy. The next one is the pedestal or boom. That's when we physically pick the camera and move it vertically up or down. Let's call this boom, I should put an exclamation mark there because it makes it look. This one, same deal as the other ones with the two arrows of the side. [NOISE] We'll call that one boom up and of course boom down, sweet. Now the final one that I'll show you today is called the rotation or the roll. This one's a little bit tricky to draw, but we're going to do it anyway. I think we should draw another dude like we did before. Let's have some shoulders again, little eyes there. We're going to do like Dutch angle on this fellow. There we go. The frame is going to end up twisted. All know got to do is to indicate which way it rotates from the corner of the frame. It's saying it's going to twist to the left or anticlockwise. [NOISE] That means I'm going to grab the frame and give it a nice twist and it's going to end on those eyeballs right there. Of course, if you want to twist the other way you do that. Towards [NOISE] this direction. Cool adds, easy-peasy. [MUSIC] 10. Drawing anything: Basic objects: [MUSIC] When drawing your story bullets, you'll find your primary responsibility is placing your characters in the frame. However, there are times when props and environment can play a key part of your story too. How do we learn how to draw anything and everything within a few short minutes? Well, the answer is we can't. [MUSIC] But, what we'll be doing is finding reference then use our observation skills to draw our objects. We'll use primary shapes and proportions to do our best at making it look real. [MUSIC] We're going to look at drawing a car. We're going to break it down into its basic shapes. We're going to look at five things that make it look like a car, then we're going to have a crack and drawing it. The other thing we're going to do is make sure we've got the proportions of the car, a little bit like a human body and hopefully it'll look like a car by the end of it. Let's have a quick look at what shapes make up the car. We have got a rectangular shape which makes up the body of the car. This part here is called the greenhouse of the car and it's four-sided thing. Then we've got the wheels couple of circles cool and cool. Let's have a crack at drawing it. We'll start just by drawing that real basic square shape and it's pretty easy here because we've got the reference straight bar so we know it's going to be like this big. Cool. How wide is it? This is where I'm going to stop probably using [NOISE] our proportions, and I'm going to use a wheel to measure stuff. But we use colors. This is my car. I would say it's probably about the size of the wheel. We have this big here can it says squish. Next we're going to draw wheels. Take a little couple of measurements here. Slits probably bigger than this height wise. I would say that's nearly half the size of it. Let's start by drawing the roofy part. What is the angle come down just behind the back wheel. Has slides. Where does it end? We'll do another little proportional. That's the whole car. Is probably about three-quarters maybe. I'll just record this. This is half three corners and ends. That's [inaudible] and the wheels. The wheels, there are probably about nearly the same size as the body. Drawing circles is tricky. [NOISE] Where does the other wheel go? We're going to measure that with wheels. We're going to say is one wheel two, and three. Three wheels here one, two, three and the wheel is there [inaudible] Cool. Now let's look at another couple of things that make a car look like a car. Now you'll see on this picture they've got like a ground plane. We can see the car. That's actually when it comes to drawing cars, it's pretty helpful. I'm going to draw the ground. One of the things that we've got the mixer color come, we can refine the shape of it, gives us nice roundness. Let's care of the back of it. You'll notice there's a bit of which shape in here. Just cut that out. At the front. Maybe we can slide off the front here. Let's have a look at the shape. It's the negative area or right at the front. How about we have a crack drawing. This is called the greenhouse to spit here. What is the first window like? Let's say we'll cut it instead. It's a little bit Science Office windows here. Second one does a little bit slight back there and the last window is here, you slip the back of it. How about we add a couple of door handles in the middle cell so it's a car? What else? Maybe we can do and shut the headlight. It's like a triangle. [MUSIC] Now we have got ourselves a green car. The beauty of all that is doing that little study and being that we're visual creatures by nature, all that information slowly gets committed to your memory. If you study a car a couple of times and you draw it a couple of times just by the act of looking at it, observing and drawing it, you basically going to commit it to memory. If you can remember from what we did before, I'm going have you to have a crack at drawing that car just for memory again, it's probably going to turn out exactly the same, but it's difficult a little like a car which is what we want. I'm going to start by drawing the ground planning. I'm going to draw the first wheel. Oh, here we go circle. Now for memory. Remember it was like three wheels between. I'm going to do the ones three wheels. Then the next wheel will be here. Let's get rid of those. I think if you remember, the bottom of that rectangle is through the wheels. It was pretty much even so. The height of this one was about the size of the wheels. Just guessing. The greenhouse on top was about half this. Slept away. If you remember the slope, I think it was the headquarters. I think it ended here at three-quarters in. Let's stay on top of it and then it's sloped in. That's a shape. It's not quite right, but it's a proper proportion of the vehicle when we get that little which that would cut out here. I think that rounded off a bit here and it was a triangle with it for the front and a triangle for the back. Then I think this was this maybe and the window curved a little bit that way from that, this one slipped away a bit, and the other one sloped back and then there was some door handles. The good thing is we know how a car looks like. We know functionally the door handles close to the edge of the window. Even from your memory or even just look out the door real quick [inaudible]. I think the door was sloppy, which is the reason for that because otherwise it will bang into this wheel here. Do the wheel arch, because it always seems to make it look cool. I think last time I actually made a bit brand or the back, look a bit noiser. Because it was quite round the shape that car. Cool. That my friends is your car from memory. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC] For this example, I've got three objects. We've got ourselves a gun [NOISE], a knife [NOISE] and something from the environment, a tree [NOISE]. What we're going to do is use your powers of observation. We're going to pick three things that really identify these objects. Starting with the gun, we're going to pick the three things that identify gun. Those three things I've picked was a handgun has a barrel, has a grip, and it has a trigger. [MUSIC] To create the gun if you have a look at it from this angle, it's mainly the primary shape of a rectangle. Is a rectangle for the barrel. We use a slightly skewed rectangle for the grip. On this top of gun, it's mainly like a square for the trigger guard. Then I'll do a nice little shape for the trigger. Easy-peasy. Let's go on to the next one. Looking at the knife, similar scenario again, the three things that make up a knife, if you can see is the handle, little guard because over the handle and then the blade. Similar to the gun, it's basically rectangles, we got a rectangle for that. Rectangle for the guard, and a rectangle with a pointy trying to keep it at the end for the blade, this is easy. The last one is a tree. A tree is real basic. It really is just a lollipop shape. You'll see that lollipop shape a lot in architecture drawings. That's how they simplify their trees. We just do the trunk of the tree. Then we can just do a circular shape to represent the mass of the branches and the leaves. Easy-peasy. Once we've established the main shape of the object, casting a nice silhouette so you can tell what it is, you can, if you like, go in and add some detail to really sell the object that you've drawn. For the gun, I've picked another couple of parts of the gun that really sell it, cut a little slide across there. A couple of hindsight's going to add the clip for the bullets, couple of little screws and dots. Thicken up. Just amend the shape a little bit of the trigger guard. Looking for those main bits and pieces that really sell the image. Then add a few curves onto our rectangle shape. Same scenario with the knife. I'll go through and I'll curve out a few slots. There's little finger grips, little couple of screws in there. Trim it a little area for the blade and put that little serrated edge, like the point of it is all pointing. A tree is a little bit different scenario. I'm going to get rid of the original shape. I'm just going to put some J lines around the edge to show this rough silhouette that the leaves like. Those steps are great for drawing really basic stuff. But it doesn't help when trying to make things look three-dimensional. Let's have a look at the next video to see how to draw stuff in three dimensions. 11. Drawing anything: 3D shapes: Now, three-dimensional drawing is a whole another level, which like my previous cop-outs, I wouldn't be able to teach you in this course. I will however, give you a quick demo on how you would tackle a 3D drawing and an alternative time-saving hack, which I use myself for drawing tricky things. Let's take a look. [MUSIC] We're now drawing in a car from the sun. It's not too hard. It's pretty much a square, as we had a look at. We've got the greenhouse on the top, and then we've got the wheels in the back. Then a little bit of refinement. Couple of extra shapes just to sell it, and we've got ourselves a cool looking machine. [MUSIC] But what happens if the car is on a slightly trickier angle like this? This is where things get slightly complicated, and we have to know how to draw in three-dimensions while using perspective. For instance, we would need to establish a horizon line. Start by drawing maybe the back of the car, and then to draw this side part here, this is the box. I need to get a vanishing point and some vanishing lines. [MUSIC] As you see, the wheels are no longer circles. As they squeeze to the back, they become ellipses. We have to do ellipses. [MUSIC] Then we also now can see the back of the car, back wheel, drop in there too [inaudible] inside of it. [MUSIC] As you can see, things start to get a bit more complex. [MUSIC] Let's go, back window there. It could just make up the shape car. That's just a really rough one. Basically, that's the shape here. It's a cube, [MUSIC] and the wheels are cylinders, but in perspective. [MUSIC] That's just a little taste of drawing in 3D and in perspective. If you're interested about learning more, I have some links to some great resources. But for now, let's move on to an easy hack, that even though I can draw properly, use often, especially when in a rush. It's good old fashion tracing. Disclaimer. Let's remember, these are not finished artworks we are creating. They're just a tool to communicate our ideas. There's no storyboard police saying, "You can't do that." There's no plagiarism as these are just used as a reference. Let us have a look at how I tackled some professional storyboards I created as part of presenting product placement opportunities for an independent film. Our first panel we're going to look at was for a movie where we were looking at trying to add some product placement in. That's why it's got the blue squares. That's opportunities for product placement in the shots. These ones I want to look nice and have a really interesting composition to sell the movie a bit. I was looking for shots of a bit more complex, so I had like a really, like I said, interesting composition. How I tackled this one is I looked for reference images and then I placed them within my panel and then I traced over them. Then I added the extra detail or manipulated it so it suited that the story. Let's have a look at the first one. Panel 1, they're both standing in the ATM. I had us look online and I found the shop that I thought would look really cool. I liked how he was standing to the side of the frame, but I did need his buddy in there. What I did is I traced in the details that I thought were important, the guy standing near the ATM on a wall and stuff. Then what I did is I traced his mate next to him, because they're both at the ATM trying to get money out. It's super-duper easy. I just did the most basic lines on the corner of the shop, the ATM sign how it stood in the actual machine itself. Also, I extended the wall so I could fit some posters and stuff like that for the product placement. Let's have a look at one of them. Let's have a look at the next panel. Make sure you turn that guy off. Number 2, this is more of a punched and shot at them at the ATM, and probably having a bit of of a little chit-chat. Same situation again, I found another picture of a dude at the ATM. I liked how it was but didn't like the way his hands were. So I quickly just jammed that in his pocket, and then drew in his mate. Then I had a nice little panel here. Super quick and easy. Don't need to know a lot about drawing. Next one, person standing at the ATM. Now this class was a little bit more tricky, because I couldn't find a picture of someone like that, with the card right in the middle of the frame so you can see it. I had to squish two pictures together. The first one you can see, I'll turn this sketch off, is a lady sitting at a desk holding a card. I really want that hand and that card and that over the shoulder shot. I thought it was really cool. But of course there's no ATM. I found a picture of an ATM. That's not the ATM, this one is. Then crunched or smashed the shots together, so you get these two, and then I just traced over it. What I ended up getting was this guy. Let's have a look at another one, another panel. Turn that guy off. Similar situation for this guy too. I think with that one I drew, that one just from scratch I drew a bottle and then made them smaller, and then put a little bit of a blur on it. It's cool. The second one, however, I pinched a picture because it looks really cool. I like that angle, found that when I was scrolling through. Let's have a look. This is the original image. Pretty much the same. I just added a second glass. I'll crank up the person just a second and see. I like that angle. I thought it was really dramatic. It has that perspective, you've got the bottle in the foreground, you got the mid ground with the glass, and the background with a table that is resting on. The last shot couldn't quite figure out. The main character is in the middle there is lit up. There's one on the table, and there's a guy not paying any attention on his phone, but he's the main dude. Actually, it's funny because it's from a comedy, so that's Step Bros. [LAUGHTER] It's funny. I like the composition. I thought it was cool. All I did was just turn him around to see what the description of the theme was, and I sketched right up. [MUSIC] Look with that on. I drew a couple of collections of glass on the table, and that was handy, wasn't it? Then I drew it again. There was a couple of glasses. They're all drinking wine. Then I just turned them around. Then I made the lighting a little bit more dramatic to drawing. Really focus on that character. Next one is, what do you do if you rolling ran and you got a really specific angle or shot in mind and you can't find a picture online that you can trace over quickly and stuff? In this situation, I just couldn't find the right shot. It was like a top-down shot. This is a panel 2 of him looking at getting a frozen bag of peas out of a shopping bag, because he got punched in the face and he wanted to fix up a bruise. For this one, all I did was I grabbed my camera and I just took a real quick shot of me lifting out, how I thought the angle would look just on a floor of my room in my house, pulling out a lens of all things. Then I just manipulated it to look like a bag of peas. Let's see that again. Sketch. That's the picture there, and that's just a draw over the top grabbing the bits of information either, turn a little bit of a dashboard behind it, so look more like a car. I did the same for the fifth panel, which is this one with the frying pan. I couldn't find anything where it's like the angle looked like exciting and I thought having this diagonal shot with the bag in the bottom of the frame, the bag of peas. I took a little biggie. As my kitchen, I check the pan where I wanted, I set up a shot, how I liked with my camera, took a quick picture, came back to my computer, and then just draw over top of it. You get a nice little panel. Easy peasy. [MUSIC] 12. Storyboarding out a scene: To start on this particular project, I hadn't been in contact with the director yet. For me I had to generate the ideas from scratch and that's why you can see me having a look through the script to start with and generating a couple of script idea is just to get me started. Let's start with the opening frame. Now it's a top-down view to bird's-eye view and both characters are looking away from each other, that's why I've drawn his shoulders like that. I put them on a diagonal because I thought it's a bit more dynamic than putting them direct horizontal across from each other. Now the script called for some Polaroid pictures on the ground from one of the characters and that's the one on the left. I'm just trying to thinking about how her legs might look like probably like crossed. That's why I blocked out that shape like some crossed legs. Couple more little piggies. Now, if you notice I'm drawing pretty slow because some of the footage that I've played back for you from some of the other parts of the course, I speed up the footage because otherwise it would have been boring watching me draw for hours and hours. I speeded up quite a bit just so you could see what was going on. But for this one, I purposely left it at normal speed just so you get a bit of a feel about how fast I actually draw. If you noticed, it's not that quick. A lot of the time you'll see I'm not actually moving or drawing, I'm thinking. Thinking a lot and then trying to draw those ideas as they come into my head. This is one of the good things about Photoshop as you can see. I didn't quite like how it set the frame so I can shift it around a little bit, which is pretty handy. I'm using Photoshop for this one mainly because it's easier to demonstrate to you, especially this is going to go through for the director to have a look at and it's easier to just to shoot it out as a JPEG and then send it off rather than drawing. Here, I've decided to draw a little bit of a rug under them or a mat because I felt like these two characters are actually meant to be connected in the scene and I thought by having them sitting on a rug on the square, the square frames and connects them. That was a whole thought process behind that. Here I was thinking, how can I get a little bit dynamic? I was thinking, maybe you could have something cool like the light coming through the window frames. This is me fluffing around with that idea there. Anyway, this is another cool thing about Photoshopping out. Do this little quick mass and stuff. Funny enough though, even if you haven't used Photoshop before, you're looking at this tool going, wow, this is totally awesome. I actually still preferred drawing just on paper when I can. I find it so much easier. I find it a weird disconnect drawing with Photoshop than using the way com tablet. The other good thing about drawing on paper is, once you draw the line, especially if you're using a pen, you really got to commit to the idea. I think it's a really good discipline to learn because you're thinking about every single one that you're going to make. The problem we have sometimes with Photoshop is you've got the ability just to undo all the time. You'd like to try that? Try that and I think it's quite fun. It's a bit of thought process. If you like thinking about what you're going to draw before you put it down on paper. Visualizing your strokes. I think now I've decided, I've tried to put this light source in, all this light coming through the window framing them and it's probably just a bit too crazy. I'm just trying to soften the edges here to make a little bit more natural. Now normally I wouldn't put this much time into a single frame. But this is the opening scene of the film. I thought, I better put some time into this. Make it really stand out because it's a very important scene. Way too much shadow so I dropped it down a bit. I'm playing around with the opacity. I've decided let me just make it pretty subtle, just a little bit. You can see with my drawing speed, it's already been about maybe four minutes and I've only done one frame, so I've got a heap more frames to do. It does take a while this process, but it's really good. It's really great way to figure out your ideas for your film. I've decided to tidy up and make a little bit nice and neat because this is going off to the director. I want to make it a little bit tight, little bit professional. But you can see how basic the character shapes are. Now this is very important. This is me writing notes on who's who, because it's very important for scene. I'm popping a couple of little ears on here just to give you an idea of look direction Pointing out who it is, the props that are there, you can't really tell what are they sitting on, what that in front of them. He's sitting in front of a canvas. She's got some photos spread out in the ground. This is telling whoever reads this what that shape is on the ground. Let me jump back to the script real quick just to check I've got everything. These little areas is a little bit of a pushing, a twist in pushing. This is me. The next scene called for a close-up of some pictures. Rather than try and figure it out myself, I quickly jumped on lines is another good thing about Photoshop and I was like, what's a really cool picture that could be a right angle? This is it. What I've done, instead of trying to figure out the perspective of the stuff, I did a quick little and just grabbed a picture just to get an idea of how it might look in the frame. Just to get the prospective so it doesn't look weird and off. I haven't used the layer on the picture, but the one that's described in the script. Then I've put a shoulder concern over the shoulder shot. If you're not sure, especially with closeups are looking weird, don't be afraid to grab a picture and do a quick trace over just to get an idea of how the perspective's meant to look. Another little look at the script for the next frame. Cool. This is another over the shoulder. The first-ever shoulder is our character on the opening scene on the left Leida and she's looking at some pictures. This is the other one. This the fellow Goce painting on the canvas. Super-duper rough but it's giving you an idea of how the whole sequence flows together. Now I'm trying to connect the two characters together again. This is a bit of an exchange between the both of them. I've just speed up the footage here too. Usually it's a lot slower than this, but I've decided to make it a bit quicker just so I don't stuck you for ages. I think this whole process took me hours and hours to do this opening scene. Now right here I've figured out the screen direction is not quite right. I've got Leida on the left, just like in the opening shot, and I've got Goce on the right, which should be right, but it doesn't match frames two and three. I've messed up the screen direction, they should be flipped and that's why I've put a little note their flipped to match fourth frame. I've jumped ahead a little bit here. There was another close up to a medium or a wide shot. Again, I'm just wanted to show you this frame because here there was a call for an ice-cream cone on a table. A quick Google search gave me that and I control the outline of ice-cream cone because I don't really know how to draw an ice-cream cone. This isn't about improving your drawing abilities, this is about creating some frame. I just do stuff like that just to make things quick. Just something to bear in mind, especially with creating pictures. There's no police out there saying, hey you trace that, that's cheating. It doesn't matter. What you're trying to do is get your storyboards done. It doesn't matter if your trace some some objects. Here I shuffled a few frames around. I went back and read the script and realized, actually I need to show the cone a little bit later, because she dips the cone in some boos. Some good old [inaudible] She's like, oh man I got to draw that shot. Here, have a look. This is what happens to you. As you're drawing, you might get an idea. You look back at the framing, hey, you know, it's a good idea. Maybe if I do a little focus pool that and would match up to the following frame. Quite often as you're drawing, you figure out holes in your sequence and you might go back and change them so that each keyframe blends into the next one in a nice flow. The other thing I'm doing here is I'm actually drawing quite a few frames and I wouldn't usually do this for scene, I'd only limit it to maybe about six depending on how complicated it is. Basically I'm just doing the keyframes. I'm not doing every shot reverse shot. There might be a short reverse shot. But this gives us an idea of the cameras setups we're going to need. We could, for instance, shoot the whole scene from this one camera setup here and that will go hits and the edit. Depending on your involvement in the film, especially if you're shooting it or you're directing it, this is good too because you start to get an idea about, that's way too many setups, especially for the time I've got to shoot and this is a really great way to test it out. I think here I was probably thinking man there's hardly any movement in the cameras. This is getting a bit boring I got to do something a little bit more dynamic. She's eating her ice cream, she smashes it onto his head but he doesn't actually know. Oblivious to the fact, I thought it'd be funny if it came in from off-screen. Obviously, you don't know what I'm doing here, got a bit stuck. What now, dude? Quickly look at the script. Got of problem-solving, a lot of trying to figure out, "Hey man, what I'm I meant to be doing?" Sometimes you come with an awesome idea and then you're like oh, but what do I do now? It just doesn't flow properly to the next scene. It's just not working. I'm trying to figure out something [inaudible]. So look I just deleted the whole thing without a care. Scene wasn't working. The friend didn't match up, I didn't feel it. It was just like, that's boring. Doesn't work, doesn't seem to flow. You just delete it. Move on. It's pretty important not to get too attached to your drawings because it's the entire sequence it's not just a single frame. If you start drawing a frame or to you feel like the flow is not working. It's looking boring, it's looking too generic. It doesn't really sell a story. Any of those reasons just kill it, just delete it, try something else. Because we keep these drawings so loose, we don't spend a lot of time on them it's really easy to delete them, and it's also easy to make new ones. That's the great thing about keeping it really rough. You're not really invested in the drawing. So you can easily just delete it and think of something else. I tried to give them angry eyebrows, it didn't work. We've jumped ahead quite a bit again, I've got a few frames here got a nice little pushing on the left. So remember, we're using those bits where we can define whether it's a low shot or a high shots. So we know it's a high shot because we see the bottom of the floor with lieda there. I'm playing around with power. So we're going from a low shot on Lieda, and then a high shot up to Goce. But in this part here, I think I might end up deleting this out again. But what I was trying to achieve is that we have the high and the low. There's a bit of a play of power there. But then I wanted to balance it out again. So I wanted them to be like a level shot. It's a little bit tricky because he's actually higher than here in the frame. She's sitting on the floor and he's sitting up on the stool. Yes see just killed. It wasn't working. Move on. That's what I'm thinking it's really important. I get them levels. Let's start by putting in a horizon line, and matching them up. That fit much better than that last one, and that felt all over the shop. That one's got stuff or details. It's just there to tell the story, figure out some cool framing for your cameras setups. That again, see I wanted to make sure the horizon line was stuck in the middle so it was flat so it was no one more powerful in the scene. Even though later takes up a lot of the frame and that on, e and we'll see Goce in the background. He's quite small compared to him. She's actually confronting him in this one. That's what I wanted to make them feel small. I'm just playing around with hit direction as she looks up, she hands him a picture. You would jump to handle the beginning. Again just to speed things up a bit not to make it so boring for your fellows at home on your Lieda [inaudible]. He's sad. Shifted a little bit over in the frame to make it look nicer. Little bit nicer. That's how we say nice in Australia, nice. Look the holding hands happy day. Not quite holding hands she's like passing the picture and saying, hey bro because actually it's his bro. Hey bro, brother, and sister. Bro take this little picture on your knee. Lots of notes, there we go and make it easy. Because I'm going to have to explain this to the director. If you're not felt like me you might forget what you're actually doing the day before then you can bring it on. That's right. Look here at those notes. Lot's of the that's the edge of the here's a bit too low but too extreme, is the roof so can define it's a low angle shot. [inaudible] Somebody shuts down the greatest but at least it's getting these ideas down on paper to get this overall flow that I have to be perfectly that you might find it when you go and shoot it on the day, that it might be a better shot a better angle but it's better to have a plan on the day that no plan at all. Here decide this should be in the middle of the frame a bit more. Not quite sure about that shot. Sometimes I find it helpful to have a flip back through the sequence since any other shots where we can read camera setups we use again or any ideas or how does it feel overall the sequence? Having a play with the idea here. Yeah, looks like I'm hesitating a lot. I'm not liking what I've got, and I think of yes, and it's gone again. If I ain't working, usually I just push on. You got to remember that this is a feature film on doing as well so you can't spend too much time in every frame. You just going to get through and get done. Do you first pass, see how the whole film looks together? Then come back and do some changes if you think it's needed. Obviously, I wanted some movement and I think a little bit it's something different, a bit of variety the way the camera moves. I thought this one can be cool. It's like motivated by later actually gets up, stands up. She's sitting on the floor at the moment. She stands up and we can shift the camera with her. I reckon I was happy with that shot, and then I thought hey, we could add a little bit more movement maybe. She exits the frame and leaves him. So now ride on the last shot of the opening scene which is pretty important to watch it open with, and what you're left with is very important. Wow, maybe not, maybe I've got a bit more to draw. Let's have a look of how did I just changed my mind I can't remember. Let's have a look. Yeah, can ask, it's a Canvas. Thank you very much. I think I kept this. Yeah. What's happening here is Goce is sitting in front of his canvas and he's done a little bit of painting on. Lieda gets up, she grabs another brand new blank canvas and pulls the old one away, and sticks a new one in front of him. Putting a few ideas about how the sequence of the camera movement will go, places those numbers. It helps sometimes because if you've got like two movements within one setup, you can see like he said number 1, it goes up, then number 2, it pushes over to the right. The areas in front of his blank canvas. I thought sometimes it depends how involved you are on the project but potentially I might be editing this one, maybe not who knows. But I'm always thinking to the edit as I'm doing it too. Like how do you cut from one shot to the other? Because that is important. Looks like I skipped ahead there. So when a gentle push out, the story is about a painter who's got quite a heavy artistic block. I thought it'd be neat here to leave him swimming in this big white blank canvas as we slowly push out, and he's like drowning in it. It's basically the thoughts I had. So I did that. Now I want to had to look at it and I want to show this is like the opening scenes are very important. I wanted to show the director my thoughts, my feelings, my vision, might be for it based off his script. So to make it as clear as possible because we didn't do it together. I really have to show it to him clearly. So what I'm doing here is I'm just coloring in the characters to say you can define who's who in the shot so make gospel dark Lieda very light. Just so you know who's who as we move through the sequence. Look at super speed up to icon color in that class. That would have taken me like an hour or something. Here's how the final sequence turned out for the first scene. As you see I just added a couple more things, of course, like the film title, the see number, which is seeing one of course, and also popped a few notes in a different color. I chose blue. Just bits where I think maybe something needs changing a couple of notes about maybe this could be a different shot that kind of thing. What I'm I do now which will be really helpful is to zoom up on each frame, and match the frames to the portion of the script so we can see the script and the frames side by side. Check that out in the next video. 13. Storyboard vs script: Interior loft studio; Goce's residence; Day. A spread of Polaroids are clumsily scattered on the floor. Someone is arranging and re-arranging them from above. The ones on the outer edge appear to be abstract shots of buildings and trees. There is a space in the middle, it's empty. Panning out, we see Leida;30, dark hair, medium build. Is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her graphic arrangement. Leaning back with both her arms supporting her posture, she looks out into the small studio apartment. Goce, 39, dark hair, medium build. Her brother is seen sitting on a small stool opposite a large canvas. In his right, he's holding a paintbrush, and in his left, an old Ascot cap covered in paint, he appears deep in thought. Leida observes him for a few brief moments, smiles to herself, and gets up. Speaking from afar, Leida, "Hey, you want some funky ice cream?" Goce doesn't immediately respond. Irrespectively, Leida makes her way to the kitchenette and is seen opening the fridge. Goce, "What makes it funky?" Leida is seen scooping up the white vanilla ice cream from the medium size tub into an ice cream cone. Leida to herself, "Good question." Spotting half a glass of what appears to be brandy, she dips the ice cream cone into the glass before jumping up onto the counter from where she now sits. She tastes her impromptu concoction. Leida, "Not bad at all." Staring out at Goce, he has now placed the cap onto his head and appears entirely absorbed in the painting. Leida munches away on her ice cream before jumping off the counter. Very carefully, she advances towards him holding the ice cream cone. On route, she dips down and with her left hand and retrieves her Polaroid camera, which she now holds in a steady position. Sneakily, she approaches Goce from behind and very gently places the ice cream cone on his cap. He doesn't notice, and is delicately going over a pattern on the canvas before him. Leida restrains her laughter by cupping her right hand over her mouth. As she retreats back, she aims her Polaroid camera at Goce, unaware he has an ice cream cone on his head. She snaps the Polaroid and the photo streams out. She shakes the picture, its come out perfect. She then makes her way back to the section of the floor with all the arranged pictures and places it in the vacant spot she'd reserved. It's completed the collage. Leida, "Perfecto." Goce turns around, Goce, "What the **** Lid, Jesus." He places the ice cream cone off his cap and it falls to the floor. Meanwhile, Leida is laughing and she rolls back. Angrily, Goce is cleaning the cap with the sleeve of an old shirt he's wearing. He looks down at the ice cream cone, it's splattered all over the white drop-down fabric. He looks over at Leida who has a big old smile on her face. Goce, "Not funny. I'm trying to work here." Answering back from the floor, Leida, "So am I, and I've made progress. Look." Goce looks over at Leida's collage, then back at the cap. Goce, "You know it's my lucky cap. Every piece I've done." Leida, "Save it. I've heard this a million times. You got to live a little. Besides, I remember when she was still alive, when she gave you that cap." Goce pauses and finishes cleaning the cap. Leida now enters the frame and about faces him. Leida, "Maybe I can get you a new one? Goce, "You're missing the point, it gets me into the space." Leida, "Yeah. Well, about the exhibition piece, you know the Stalker exhibition is the most prestigious one out there. Imagine this, your piece exhibited at Stalker. That's your window." Leida points to a large canvas that sits to the far end of the room still in its packaging. Goce goes silent and looks back at the piece he's been working on. Leida picks up on this. Leida, "Listen, I know procrastination when I see it, and you have till mid-April to get this in. Doesn't leave much time, does it?" Goce appears to be frozen in place. He puts the cap back on and sits down on the stool facing Leida. Sensing the elephant in the room, Leida ducks out of frame briefly before coming back with the Polaroid she'd taken of Goce a few moments earlier. She hands the photo to him as he observes it. Goce, "Looks absurd." Leida, "You know what's really absurd, the fact that you've stopped doing your portrait pieces completely." Goce is silent on the matter while moving his thumb up and down the Polaroid. Leida, "It all happened after she died. Your blocker, both you and dad stopped at something. For him, well, that's fairly obvious. For you, well, imagine if she was here today?" Goce, "It's not that simple. Leida, "Nothing is. The exhibition, that one opportunity, it's your window remember. The whole 'windows' discussion she'd have with us. You may not even realize it's there." Goce, "I'm staying with abstract. I just." Leida now approaches Goce, and places both her hands on his shoulders. Leida, "Look at me." Momentarily, Goce looks away, then makes eye contact. Leida, "As long as I'm around, I'm going to ensure that every one of these little windows that open up for you are seized. You got that?" Goce, "I don't even have a sitter." Leida smiles and pulls back. She walks up to the easel, and takes the canvas he's working on off, resting it against the wall, before retrieving the unpacked new canvas and placing it on the easel. She throws a look back at Goce who has now stood up. Leida, "No excuses. We'll find you a sitter." [MUSIC] 14. Final thoughts: [MUSIC] A lot of people don't even have the confidence to try drawing, so good on you for making it all the way through to the end of this course. I really hope you had fun learning the basics of storyboard. Just a little recap. Don't forget to get those proportions right when drawing people. Think about where to place the horizon line, for interior scenes, identify the camera angles by showing the ground or the ceiling planes. Don't forget them arrows for movement. Finally, experiment, explore, and have fun with it. Remember, these are all you need to visualize your film. Like these famous Hollywood directors, you too can visualize your film through storyboards. So go off and unlock that happy little child on you [NOISE] that used to color and draw without a care in the world. I'll leave you with one little quote from the man Mr. Pablo Picasso, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Be safe. [MUSIC]