Ben Juwono: Improving storyboarding workflow to increase speed and efficiency
On Twitter Disney director Ben Juwono shared a bunch of tips on efficiency in storyboarding. I collected them into the article below. (Minor edits by me)
Ben Juwono: Caveat: these are general tips and tricks because clearly the workflow is different between Photoshop and SBPro, but I will try to touch on both.
Shorthand
The first thing to get out of the way is that storyboarding speed comes with mileage. The more you draw the character, the faster you are at drawing them. There's just no shortcut to that. So get as much mileage as you can. Practice the characters on your own time.
Mileage also helps you shorthand the characters better. Shorthanding means drawing JUST enough so everyone can tell who the character is, what they're doing, at what angle, what emotions they're conveying, and which way their different body parts are facing.
Mileage also helps you shorthand the characters better. Shorthanding means drawing JUST enough so everyone can tell who the character is, what they're doing, at what angle, what emotions they're conveying, and which way their different body parts are facing.
Below is an example of a shot from Baymax Returns. It's a scene where Wasabi, Gogo, and Honey saw an offscreen Hiro doing something ridiculous and stopped to look. Simple scene, simple poses. But it can take 10-15 mins to draw, or 1-2 minute if you shorthand right.
The idea is that you don't need to draw all the details that make up Honey, Wasabi, or Gogo, for them to read clearly as themselves. And eliminating unnecessary details really cut down on the time spent drawing. Have a look at the following simplification of Honey:
The important part is the pose and expression, not the strap details, her butterfly collar, the lapels of the sweater, the elastics on the wrist, or the shape of her glasses. You can capture the pose and expression by focusing on the head and overall silhouette of the body. Drawings that are extremely tight ("on model") tend to lose the life and energy of something looser and more gestural. The amount of details on "clean" drawings also tend to muddle clarity.
Look at how distracting all the lines on Honey from the neck down are in the clean drawing. That said, the idea of structure and form needs to still exist. The overlaps on her elbows and wrist are shown to indicate direction of arm, that it's facing camera. Think about where the audience needs to be looking when they see the panel and focus your effort there.
Look at how distracting all the lines on Honey from the neck down are in the clean drawing. That said, the idea of structure and form needs to still exist. The overlaps on her elbows and wrist are shown to indicate direction of arm, that it's facing camera. Think about where the audience needs to be looking when they see the panel and focus your effort there.
Here's another example with Wasabi. The expression is clear and the pose is clear. It's clear NOT because it's clean, but because it's not muddled by the amount of lines forming the drawing. Less is more. The trick is knowing what to draw and what NOT to draw. Editing out details help clarity because there's less lines for your brain to process. We say that these drawings "read faster" as in we understand what they're conveying faster than a detailed, intricate drawing. Also these drawings of Honey & Wasabi took about 30-40 secs each.
Imagine how much time you can save when you're spending 2-3 minutes drawing a panel with 3 characters vs doing a more detailed drawings of the same panel that takes 15 minutes. In 15 minutes you'll have drawn 5 panels instead of one and you'll have earned that Facebook break.
I believe in "less is more" and in "indicating, not detailing." You can surprisingly accomplish a lot with by just indicating contour lines and no details. Here's 4 bodies that are copy paste of each other. Look at the different things you can convey with a few contour lines.
The middle two drawings of the slight upshot, their arms are facing different directions. The left one has left arm back and right arm forward, the right one is the opposite. Now just cycle between the two (with minor warping / stretching tweaks) and you have a character walking.
Utilize the ability to select and tweak individual lines on SBPro to convey multiple poses. On Photoshop the Warp Tool is your best friend. Both these methods are faster than REDRAWING. This way all you need is ONE solid, structured drawing, and you can tweak the hell out of it.
Anyway, these are things I normally cover in my storyboard class. I thought I'd share them here since I probably won't have time to teach in the near future. There are more, but we can be here all day.
Workflow
The other thing I wanna talk about is your WORKFLOW. Every software comes with default keyboard shortcuts, and you should never just accept this the way it is. Using [ and ] to increase and decrease brush sizes is mind-bogglingly inefficient. At the same time, the H key is a duplicate hand tool you can get by pressing space. The N key does absolutely nothing (other than Ctrl N to make a new document), so it would be in your best interest to move the increase/decrease brush size from [ ] to H N. Also they're next to the B key, which is what you have to press to get Brush anyway.
You should NEVER have to reach over to the other side of the keyboard when working. Reaching over takes TIME, and to make sure you hit the right key, you sometimes have to look away from your screen. Even then sometimes you hit the wrong key and end up using the wrong tool. When this happens, you have to UNDO, and that takes time too. If you add up all the times you have to undo cuz you pressed the wrong key, the times you have to look away from screen, the times you have to reach over to the other side of the keyboard... it's a significant amount. If you can eliminate all of these things, or do preventative measures to eliminate them, then you have more time to actually draw! On top of that, every little technical mistakes like these interrupts your momentum. It's like a stop and go traffic, there's a whiplash effect.
This is how I recommend efficiency nerds like me map their keyboard. I'm right handed so I keep everything on the left side of the keyboard. Use function keys too if possible. Get a programmable keyboard. I have a razr tartarus chroma that helps with this keymapping.
When Monty Oum passed away several years ago, his colleagues talked about how much of an efficiency nerd he was. He would microwave his food at 55 secs or 66 secs instead of 60 because it's faster to press the same number twice than to move your hand down from 6 to 0. Amazing!
You might wonder what difference a split-second makes, but when you have so many split-second interruptions throughout an 8-hr day... You've lost at the very least half an hour to just undoing all your mistakes and moving your fingers farther distances than they need to.
Another thing is the idea of going through your keyboard shortcuts and DELETING shortcuts for anything you don't use regularly. Q in photoshop turns on Quick Mask, and I never use it. but in an attempt to hit Tab/1/W, I'd hit Q and it would stop me for at least a few seconds. There are many of these. Ctrl+T on PS is Transform, which I use a lot, while Ctrl+R on PS is Rulers, Often times I'd Ctrl+T a few times before I realize I'm just turning on the rulers on and off. These few seconds add up and it kills all the momentum you've built up.
Another thing is the idea of going through your keyboard shortcuts and DELETING shortcuts for anything you don't use regularly. Q in photoshop turns on Quick Mask, and I never use it. but in an attempt to hit Tab/1/W, I'd hit Q and it would stop me for at least a few seconds. There are many of these. Ctrl+T on PS is Transform, which I use a lot, while Ctrl+R on PS is Rulers, Often times I'd Ctrl+T a few times before I realize I'm just turning on the rulers on and off. These few seconds add up and it kills all the momentum you've built up.
Above are a few screencaps of my SBPro keyboard shortcuts for those interested. Notice I've eliminated stuff I never use, and all the shortcuts I use are a bit more complex to press, but they're all on the left side of the keyboard.
Yes, it takes some learning to get used to the new hotkeys and you'll make mistakes at first, but once they become muscle memory, you'll be even faster than before. This is the trick to going from 40-50 panels a day to almost 200. It's not that I'm a better/faster artist. In PS the most cumbersome thing when boarding is "save as" to a different filename. Here's a script you can assign to F1 or F2 that will "save as" to a default filename "temp-0001" and the number just keeps going up every time you save.
I tweaked an existing script to get that and it was for CS5, so I dunno the compatibility with CC, but it's useful and every time you finish a panel you can just hit F1/F2 and keep going because it spits out a new, separate file you won't risk messing up.
The only thing you have to edit in that script is the file location. The filename defaults to temp-#### so if you don't like that you can change that as well. This way you can just focus on boarding and later on flip through/delete/move around the many panels on Bridge.
Anyway, that's all I got for today, it's a long enough thread anyway. Please keep in mind that the shortcuts I posted aren't meant to be taken verbatim. You should always optimize your workspace to YOUR needs and YOUR system. Don't just use the default.
