A lot of people have found my answers to questions related to StoryBoarding helpful so I’m going to make this answer re-bloggable as well in case you find it helpful too :)
Hi there!
When I started building my storyboard portfolio, I was very fortunate to be able to learn a lot from my best friend Kyle, who is a super amazing storyboard artist! His teachings helped me take the bare bones basics of storyboarding I’d learned in school and start to produce some boards. I was trying to tackle too much at once, and he recommended I focus on a small part of a script to get started. I used some frame templates and started making boards off a couple of pages from a short script I’d written. I learned a lot from him through critique and revisions. So many revisions :D
I also started learning from the lessons of the amazing Sherm Cohen. Sherm’s got an amazing amount of knowledge and experience in storyboarding! He’s extremely friendly and one of the nicest folks I’ve ever had the good fortune of meeting. He has created a series of lessons to teach about storyboarding, and his lessons are very clear and very understandable even to beginners. When I was learning from his DVDs, the information stuck and it really drove the techniques of boarding, home. His site has all sorts of info about his lesson DVDs, tutorials for things like Line Of Action, galleries of different kinds of storyboards for you to look at, and he even has postings for job and internship openings! You can follow him on his webpage StoryboardSecrets as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and DeviantArt.
Here’s a super cool tips:
-My pal had me find a script for a movie and board that! I went with a few pages from the first draft of Back to the Future, and storyboarded it like it were a cartoon :D
It was a ton of fun because the pages I picked from the first draft are so very different from the movie we know, and I had a blast boarding it!
-Don’t forget to focus. This is a huge help if you’re just starting out. Two pages of script for me turned into fourteen pages of boards. Don’t let a lot of script overwhelm or intimidate you when you start out.
-Feedback and critiques are your bestest friends :D
-There are a LOAD of storyboard templates you can use for free online! AnimationMeat has some of my favorites!
-Don’t fall in love with a joke or drawing. If it just ain’t working out and making the boards strong, dump it and try something else.
-You can do boards traditionally or digitally.
-Wide Post-It Notes are your friend. You can draw boards on em, stick em to a board, rearrange them, and then either redraw panels based on them, or scan them, clip em up and put em into the template.
-You’re gonna be drawing a LOT. Have ample supplies!
-Check out boards for TV and film animation. You can learn a lot by looking at boards, and use them to better recognize things that work well when boarding (Line of Action, Silhouette, staging, so on and so forth.)
-I found it helpful to take a break every so often and walk around. I would focus so intently on the boards and I found I felt a lot better and worked a lot better when I gave myself a chance to step away, drink some water, and shake my hand out so it wouldn’t get ground into the paper
-Have a digital copy to send to job postings. You can make a PDF of the pages and send that out, or have something nice and tidy to take to a printer if need be.
I hope this has been helpful! Feel free to ask if you need more info!
This question was originally answered here.
Another question about Storyboarding (Storyboarding Tips) that I answered on my blog can be found here.
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on tumblr: http://aronjshay.tumblr.com/post/50442417125
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