My Process for Personal Storyboard Projects

Storyboard thumbnails, done on paper

Recently I shared a storyboard that I did as a personal project: a storyboard based on the script from the film Dragonheart. I thought it might be interesting to talk a little bit about my process. How I go about storyboarding a scene and what steps I take to go from roughs to a finished storyboard. 

I started this project with an existing script, but you can also use a personal idea or story. When it comes to doing a personal project or portfolio piece, you are basically the director of your own show and you can do anything you want. As fun as this may sound, for me this is also one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. If anything goes how do you know what it is you want to do?

I like to make notes on my script pages

For me it helps to start by following a simple first idea. A single thought for the scene: a setting, a gag, or even an action for one of the characters. I follow that first thought and see what other things it will lead me to. In the example of my Dragonheart boards, I had this idea that it might work to stage the scene in a church ruin. It could work as a visualization of the knight, a broken man who lost everything he once believed in.

Maybe the knight and the dragon could use the ruin as shelter for the night? They could be sitting down by a camp fire. This would also allow me to include a starry sky, which fits with the story since the dragon believes that the stars are the souls of dragons that have died. And death is a theme in the scene, so by setting it in a church ruin I could include an abandoned graveyard--you see how new thoughts just began to well up as I followed my first idea?

Digital and traditional sketch explorations for my storyboard

While working out my ideas I will do a lot of very rough sketches, both digital and on paper. While sketching I am just trying to see how these ideas might work visually. Sometimes I have fun with a sketch and I will take it a little bit further and I might even share it online. But most of the time these sketches are so rough that nobody but me can make anything of it. And that's just fine, these sketches are not meant to be pretty. 

When I have a basic understanding of what the scene will be, I will look for images that inspire me, or that I can use as reference. For this storyboard I looked for images of old church ruins, the English country side and starry skies. Of course I also looked for examples of knights and dragons and I studied some other scenes set at a campfire. (Not to find shots or compositions that I could copy, but to get a feeling for the way these scenes are usually shot.)

A collection of images I collected as reference

Before I can begin with the actual storyboarding I need to figure out how I want to approach the sequence. I used to start with thumbnail sketches on paper. There is something very nice and orderly about seeing all your shots together on a page. I still do this sometime, but now I will often start drawing in Photoshop straight away. I will draw very crude panels, focussing on composition and shot progression. 

Once I have a rough idea of how I want to do the scene I will start drawing my first pass. I try to keep up the pace while working. When storyboarding at a studio you usually have one or two weeks to do a pass on a sequence (depending on the complexity of the scene). I aim for a similar time frame but, because this is a personal project, I need to work around my normal job and sometimes it takes a little longer to get things done. 

More thumbnails on paper

While I was working on my sequence I would sometimes pitch it to my coworkers, to make sure everything was clear. When I finished the sequence, I also sent it out to some of my artist friends. Most of them got back to me really fast. Less than two weeks after I finished my first version, I set out on my second pass. 

The second pass starts out like the first: with crude drawn panels in Photoshop. While doing these I would look at the previous pass to see if there were shots I could keep. But, even though the two passes were very similar in feel, I ended up drawing almost everything from scratch. Drawing the second pass took me about the same amount of time as the first one. 

Pictured below: The process from rough panel to final pass. Based on the first pass I got the note that I could push the confrontation between the dragon and the knight a bit more.  

When the second pass was done I sent it to the people who were kind enough to give me  feedback on the first pass. They all seemed to agree that it was an improvement on the previous version. Of course there were a few more notes, but it was mostly small stuff. It took me a couple of hours to incorporate those last notes and the sequence was done!  (Well, nothing is ever really finished, but I chose to leave it as it is.) 

I hope this is helpful to other artists. I'm curious what some of the things are you might run into while working on your personal projects?