Keys

One of the easiest ways to think of story boarding is to verbally describe the action in a scene. For instance, a man enters the coffee shop, he orders coffee and a cold croissant. He waits for the cashier to give him his croissant, then goes to unpack his stuff at the counter spot he’s going to sit at. He takes out his laptop, removes the laptop from its case, returns the laptop to the bag, takes out the plugs, headphones, and mouse. He assembles the plug, then plugs the laptop in, etc.

Golden Poses

• The first pose is always a golden pose
• If there is movement from one location to another, at least one pose between the two places to indicate how he got there are needed
• Each major expression is a golden pose. For example, shooshing somebody, or a thumbs up.
• Each golden pose should be self explanatory - i.e. shooshing doesn’t need an explanation
  • The Golden poses tells the story

Contact Poses

• A foot contacting the ground
• Grabbing something, or hands touching surfaces
• Where contact between the character and something else happens

Performance Keys

These are keys for any other action in the shot that has not been included yet.

• For instance, a closeup of the eyes shifting from one object to another

Extremes

These keys tell the computer to hold the pose. Anywhere that the character, or the character’s expression, has reached the maximum of the pose before shifting defines the extremes.

One would also put keys on the holds so that the body does not drift between the start and end of the hold.

Breakdowns

Breakdowns are helper poses situated between keyframes. It describes how the body gets from one key pose to the next. As a general rule you’ll have a key about every 4th frame of your action. You want everything that the computer can’t do automatically to be keyed.

• Arcs
  • Think of two keys for a ball starting at one location and ending at another
    • There is no information for how the ball gets to the end position
    • The ball could travel in a line
    • It could travel in an arc
    • It could follow an S path
• Favoring
  • Some parts of the body arrive at the next key before others
    • For instance, a head may turn before the torso does
• Visual Interest
  • An eyeblink
  • Hand gestures
  • Head shake
  • Squash or stretch

In-betweens

You want the computer to take over for this stage. If you’re doing constant animation, the in-betweens will occur when you switch to Bezier. You’ll want to adjust the handles, but the computer is otherwise calculating this for you.