FBF to Create Moving Storyboards in AS Pro 11

[strider2000]

The idea of using Anime Studio for creating storyboards is one I've been thinking about for a while. I've thought of using characters I've created and just posing them in scenes using step interpolation. I think that can work great if I already have rigged characters and potentially backgrounds as well. So that might be fine for episodes in a series. I've also thought of creating rigged generic characters just for storyboards or animatics.

Alternatively, I've been thinking about the new FBF and the quick and dirty nature of a testing out an idea with very rough sketches. So I thought I'd give it a shot.

For me, one of the biggest hindrances to my animating is the desire to perfect everything. I'm not a good enough artist to whip things out. I have to sketch and then refine and work very slowly to get decent quality. The rigged characters can help with the quality (once I've taken all the time to create and rig them), but I have a few problems
1) What if I don't have the character, prop or background I need?
2) The finished quality of a rigged character makes me hesitant to just sketch out something and throw it in with the finished character
3) I very easily start focusing on perfecting the character or prop rather than trying the story and that takes me forever, especially when I see the
great quality of everyone else's work

The end result is that most of my ideas, never become much more than a few words on a note card.

Today I had a discussion about sensitivity and thought of a little animation that could illustrate the idea. Normally that would have just been an idea in my head and that would be the end of it. If it felt like a really good idea or I might write it down. If it was more than just an idea I might sketch a picture and if it was easy to animate or I had the right characters I might try to animate it (other wise most of my animations truthfully center around just learning the ability to animate).

So ... I decided to allow the new FBF tool to help me move away from just an idea to an idea in motion.

Interestingly enough, as soon as I finished sketching the idea, I thought .... hey AS has recording directly in the program and I can easily re-time the frames so let me go ahead and turn it into a video. (Thus I went from nothing to a video I could watch and think about whether or not it was worth pursuing in just a few minutes. I apologize for the horrible artwork, but that's the idea of my adventure. Stop being afraid of all the things you could do better and get something out there (for me to look at/experience) and see if it works.



Lessons I've learned
1) FBF makes it very easy to turn an idea into a audio/video in one program, very quickly
2) The default pencil looks pretty ugly, so I really need to take the time to find the brush that I like
3) You can whip out sketches very quickly, but you don't need to stop there
4) It's very easy to see the story flow and to adjust it on the fly
5) Using FBF in AS would allow me to build a real animation directly on top of the storyboard!

[funksmaname]

This is a great guide to doing things right

Biggest problem us 'tinkerers' have with actually completing a project is that without a clear plan of each shot needed we end up spending our whole lives trying to create an unnecessarily generic rig that will allow us to do any possible movement - while our actual end idea might just be to have it staring at the camera and blinking

I think it's important to do this if you really want to plan a scene - it's like sketching in time and gives you great freedom to make editorial decisions with no waste of polished work!

[strider2000]

... we end up spending our whole lives trying to create an unnecessarily generic rig that will allow us to do any possible movement - while our actual end idea might just be to have it staring at the camera and blinking

You've been reading my mind That's exactly what I tend to do

[Greenlaw]

Nice workflow! I'm all about planning and preproduction, so any new technique in this area interests me greatly. Thanks for sharing that.

Regarding 'unnecessarily-complicated-do-it-all rigs':

One of the things I like about Anime is that it makes it so easy to create rigs 'on the fly'. Typically, I like to set up rigs that handle maybe 50-75% of what I'll need them to do for as many shots as possible, and I'll design these rigs with easy customization in mind. Once I'm into full production, I'll use the rigs as much as I can but if I can't adapt an existing rig for a given scene, I like to make quick 'one-off' rigs as the need arises--these rigs are designed to perform the the one thing that may only ever appear once or twice in the whole production, so I don't want to spend too much time on them.

Usually, I'll know way ahead of time where I'm going to need the 'one-offs', and I'll already have a good idea of what I'll need to do to create them. This is where pre-planning comes in handy. When I create a storyboard, I can determine how many wide shots there are (full body, mid body), how many close ups, how many x-flips will occur (important when the characters are asymmetrical,) and how many FBF and FBF-hybrid scenes I'll need. If I wind up with too many time-consuming 'specials', it's time rethink and edit the storyboard. Try to get the storyboard 'carved in stone' before you start animating--it can become disruptive to change the storyboard after you're in production.

A 'moving storyboard' is commonly called an animatic. (Sometimes it's called a 'Leica Reel' because of the camera they would to shoot it with in 'the old days'. TBH, I don't think I've heard anyone actually call it that since I've been working in the business.) The animatic gives me timing information, which may help in deciding just how much effort I want to put into a 'one-off' rig that may only appear for a few seconds.

The reason I avoid over-engineering a single rig to suite 'every imaginable situation' is because I often find that a complicated rig can be difficult and time-consuming to modify for the few poses or motions where they don't work quite so well. In my experience, it's more efficient to have a rig that does a lot of general actions very cleanly, and make 'specials' for those poses and motions that might be difficult to do with a 'generic' rig.

IMO, the 'do-it-all' rig should be fine if your characters perform a limited set of actions at any time, but for the animations Alisa and I like to do, that is almost never the case. I'm not saying you shouldn't create 'do it all' rigs for your project but you should consider what your project actually needs before you start rigging.

Just a few thoughts to share. Hope this helps.

G.

[funksmaname]

Great info Greenlaw .

In my case at least, I end up tinkering with rig creation because I'm not actually doing any animation (have no idea, have no job, am just tinkering for fun) - when it comes down to it the more pre-production you do, the less wasted work throughout the process!

[strider2000]

Thanks for the tips Greenlaw. It's very helpful to know how people work. Anime Studio is so rich that a lot of what I do is still just learning how to do things (and what the limits are for different tools/rigs/techniques). I recently saw one of selgin's videos where he just seemed to tweak everything on the fly and I never thought about it that way before. Your comments and things like selgin's videos help me push myself more in that direction. Thanks.