What is storyboarding?
Storyboarding is a very useful tool that is used in the fields of advertising, animation, filmmaking etc. To people who do not know about it, storyboarding process will seem a very difficult exercise. But to those who are in the film or television production industry storyboarding plays an important role. It helps to communicate the concept and vision of the project to all those who are part of the production, one way or the other. This helps in building a collective consistent effort and leads to a positive final outcome. The process of storyboarding can be dated back as far as the early 1930’s. Since that time it has been used to prepare individuals in the use of graphic design and graphic animation.
It’s Use
In a production process many people are involved. The storyboard graphics will act as one kind of collaborative tool. It is used to determine what kind of resources is required s during the different stages of a film or video production. The resources used are- actors, motion graphics, editing and contribution by other staff. From the point of view of commercial use, storyboarding in film production and television work helps to create entertainment and business marketing and communication related activities. These are also interactive sometimes, capturing the consumer’s attention. No matter what the nature of the project is, the entire development and production requires a great deal of pre planning, just as any complex project in any field would. This is the reason role of storyboarding has become so much important.
How it is done?
In the earlier days, storyboards were manually prepared. Hand drawn sketches consisted of a storyboard. Often different parts of the storyboard were drawn by different people. Some would draw figures, some would draw textual content and some people added the designing part. Then as time progressed, technological advancements were made. The whole field of visualization was revolutionized. Today, hand drawn storyboards are still used. But a large portion of it is done on computers. Digital Storyboard software has been developed. This has really sped up the entire process. Earlier even a slight mistake caused loss of time and resources. But now you can make hundreds of mistakes and all will be corrected within a matter of minutes. As a result, storyboard artists can work more freely, in a relaxed way.
Advantage of modern technology
Now that the latest technological advancements are being incorporated in the creation of storyboard graphics, things have definitely changed for the better. Now you can imagine anything and represent it in a tangible form. The animation projects which were once thought impossible to create are now right before our eyes. The Hollywood blockbuster Avatar is a prime example of this. The quality of the storyboard has improved a lot which in turn has improved the quality of animation and graphics. Every major production house and animation studio has storyboard artists in their staff. With their creativity and modern technology coming together, only good things can be expected.