'Umbrella' Part 4 - Storyboarding

Once I developed my characters enough it was time to begin storyboarding. As I mentioned in Part 2 I already did a tiny amount of storyboarding just to play around with what I wanted the story to actually be, but now that I had a clear visualisation on where I wanted to go with this I began doing a few rough sketches in Clip Studio Paint just to help extend the story better. Here's what my sketching looked like on one of the sheets of paper:

As you can see the amount of detail is incredibly rough and quick. My mindset whilst creating these was focusing less on what the storyboard was going to look like and more on the story and whats going to happen in each scene. Honestly, I think doing a rough storyboard before a clean one is a super useful way of breaking out the habit on focusing how clean the storyboard would be and just focus on the story itself. Then once you move on to doing a cleaner version you will already have an idea on what the shot will look like and it will save you a lot of time.

For the cleaner versions I ended up using Storyboard Pro which was my first time using the software so I was quite worried at the start since it did seem quite overwhelming, however with the help of Eleanora's tutorials I did eventually overcome my fear and got working on the storyboarding quickly. As I already worked in Harmony Storyboard Pro felt very similar and got me into my comfort zone straight away.

The first thing I did was to redraw each frame from the rough storyboard onto Storyboard Pro which took me a few hours but I eventually got it done, then I used the "Auto-Matte" tool recommended in the lecture to help fill in the colour for the objects which saved me a bunch of time. After that I went back to each frame and cleaned up the colour where the auto-matte leaked a bit and finally I began adding red arrows to indicate where I wanted each animated movements as well as camera movements. I added in the action notes as well as some personal notes for myself and exported the storyboard as a PDF. Here's what the outcome ended up looking like:

Personally, I am so thankful that Storyboard Pro does this template automatically because I can imagine it taking so many extra hours writing in the extra details afterwards. I would definitely recommend this to anyone else who would be working on doing storyboards like this.