by Marion Walton
Why should you learn to draw storyboards?Storyboards use an easy-to-understand and rapidly produced language which help you to plan and communicate your visual ideas for a movie. They're a way of showing others what's going on in your head, and help to reduce the costs of production. They're most often used to plan the more complex sequences from a film. (Nonetheless some directors use them for the entire film, and it is obviously essential for to storyboard an entire animation). They will help you flesh out your own ideas and then communicate them with the production team. Storyboarding is also a crucial skill for would-be animators. (In an animation, the entire production consists of drawings.) More fundamentally, practice in drawing will develop your perceptual skills. After completing the exercises in the drawing course on this site, you will see differently. You will also have developed your hand-eye co-ordination and have a handy repertoire of sketching techniques which will help you to access and explain your creative ideas. |
What skills are needed to create storyboards?
Planning shot flow
Planning the shot flow for a production is the major function of storyboards. To use storyboards for this, you’ll need a good understanding of cinematic language – primarily of cinematography (including lenses, staging and composition of the shot) and editing.
Drawing the mise en scéne
You can certainly get away with using stick figures in your storyboards, if you understand how best to use them to convey essential information about framing and the mise en scéne. For more advanced work, and particularly for animation, figure drawing skills are important. If you're serious abou learning to create presentation storyboards, or want to go on to work in animation, you'll need the ability to sketch human figures rapidly, in all sorts of poses, from all sorts of angles. We suggest some shortcuts, but if you want to develop your figure drawing skills, this site suggests a series of drawing exercises, (of the type often used in introductory figure drawing courses).
Storyboards need to convey information about lighting and the position of the camera, and it’s very difficult to do this with stick figures. The Lighting section takes you through several simple exercises to give you practice in the shading techniques that will help you to represent cinematic lighting.The exercises on Form let you try out some simple drawing techniques which will help you add three dimensionality to stick figures. Beyond this, there are also some exercises to give you practice in drawing human figures and buildings as three dimensional forms in perspective – this is particularly useful if you are interested in developing your skills as an animator.
Home | What you need | Cinematography | Editing | Mise en scéne | Scribbler | Read more