Each artist has their own preferred way of working. Some people like to arrange their panels vertically, some horizontally, some have 3 across, some have 6 down, some like 8 to a page, 9 to a page, 12 to a page, 24 to a page etc etc. Just do a google image search for “storyboards,” and take a moment to see all the billions of ways people storyboard. It seems simple, until you actually try it. I call this layout process “sequencing,” and believe me, it can be a real headache. One of the biggest challenges in storyboarding is, believe it or not, arranging the finished panels, or frames, onto a page.
But it doesn’t go far enough, not nearly far enough. The program really does a good job of meeting the needs of a highly complex and infinitely variable and rapidly evolving approach to animation production, and I’m sure it works as advertised in terms of syncing with the other Toon Boom offerings like Animate or Flip Book or whatever.īut I don’t regularly use Storyboard Pro, and doubt I will start anytime soon, because it rarely brings any utility to the field of commercial storyboarding, and it really comes down to the program’s inability to truly fine tune the page presentation layout and sequencing options, even though, as mentioned above, the program does attempt to offer a wide range of options. It’s main features include very basic drawing tools (I don’t think I’m being unfair to compare their early offerings to something visually akin to MS Paint), fairly robust formatting options, and a fairly flexible user interface. So Storyboard Pro is basically the only player in this game, currently. Other applications exist, most are free, and most are rather hideous-looking and offer no drawing tools. I’ll take a second, if you are not familiar, to introduce Storyboard Pro- to my knowledge the only serious program to attempt to tackle the unique challenges of storyboarding. You might be thinking “Don’t most drawing programs use or at least offer bitmap drawing capabilities anyway? Bit maps are just pixels, right?” You’d be right to assume that, and this feature is long overdue. The email touts the many new features, the most significant of which are the new “bitmap drawing” tools. I was working onsite yesterday and got an email notification from Toon Boom announcing their new update to the successful and highly-lauded application, Storyboard Pro, now in version 4.
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