Speedy Storyboards... How?

A goal for storyboards is speed. Start fleshing out the visual look you would like to create your story, then see what you think. Don’t like it? Change it. Iterate until you think it matches what you want.

I talked about the overall pipeline before.

Related: Storytelling: From Idea to Production

I am a programmer, and to me it is similar in principal to rapid prototyping and Agile. Get something in front of the customer they can touch and feel quickly, as you get better feedback.

Storyboarding to me is the same, but in the filmmaking world. You start with a story, write it down in a screenplay to solidify it, then do a first pass of what it might look like. The goal is not that the original screenplay must be followed precisely, but rather validate that the ideas you had hold up. If not, fix them! Its the same in programming - the initial requirements specification was a good starting point, but as the project progresses people gain a deeper understanding. In Agile, the requirements are drawn out and refined during the project. It results in a better solution.

I have a web app I have been creating for my own use. I am a programmer, so cannot resist sometimes! Given a screenplay (I use Fountain markup in a Google Doc) I can import the screenplay and extract all the dialog. I then have integrated text-to-speech library calls so can convert the dialog into an audio version with a few button clicks.

This leads to the following levels of prototyping:

• Preview 1: Read the screen play.

• Preview 2: Listen to the dialog.

• Preview 3: Watch the movie of dialog with storyboards for visuals.

The next iterations with AI are to replace the storyboards with good quality starting images, then use the images to generate video clips for each shot.

But the goal is to complete each pass, which take increasing amounts of effort, quickly. Avoid wasted effort in later stages if the need for change can be detected in earlier stages.

So how to do storyboards quickly?

I started building a simple drawing capability directly in my webapp.

Hey, it kind of works, but drawing with a mouse I find painful. So I added digital pen support and Apple Pencil support. It works, but it does not increase my drawing skill! Lol! And I still find it slows me down a bit. I have to navigate through all the UI to start a new diagram etc.

Another experiment I am trying in my web app is to hand draw storyboards on paper, then take a photo and extract the frames. Yes, I could take a carefully framed photo with my camera, but I always get shadows. So I was trying to just hold it up to my computer’s webcam, letting me input the image directly into my app (no messing around transferring files).

I then position 4 corner points and outline over the top and in the side bar pick the frames I want to extract.

The individual images are then made available as images in my gallery (rotated and perspective fixed etc).

Still experimenting, but good old pencil and paper so far feels like the fastest way to storyboard for me, even with my low grade drawing capabilities. Want a quick preview? Look at the sheets of paper in my pad!

Why does this matter? I have been looking at ways to speed up going from storyboards to first frames. I was wondering if AI could help speed up this process. The answer may be technically yes, but its not yet clear to me this is actually a good idea. Forcing better quality on the quick sketches for later phases to work better feels like it might subconsciously make me slow down on the storyboards. So still thinking it through.