Finger Industries - Storyboarding Workshop

Jonny Ford, creative director from Finger Industries guided this workshop.

Storyboarding for a client is much different to storyboarding for animators or cinematography. There are changes in detail and style required for this type of work and the description you are provided with. The software of choice that finger industries use is "Toon Boom Studio Pro" and generally they come up with a storyboard within half an hour/45 minutes. This is the sort of timing you need to work to when working for advertising animation. Storyboarding is about timing, the sort of shots and ideas, not particularly the graphic quality. With clients they tend to leave some areas of the brief blank as to encourage the creative studio to come up with creative solutions for such, therefore gauging how far the advert can be pushed. Final frames incorporate movement, directional arrows, shading, colour and refinement to the storyboard and this generally takes around an hour.

For this workshop we were given a mock brief based around recent examples they have completed and asked to complete this in groups of three. The brief asked us to create a storyboard demonstrating our interpretation of the brief and using creativity and imagination to expand the interest around the commercial. This would be based around the idea of a store to purchase helpful monsters. We were asked to create an initial rough storyboard and then later refine part of this further.

We were then asked to talk through our ideas in order to receive feedback as to encouraging practices and tips for improvement. Some points which I found really useful were to thinks about camera angles and how to position the scene in terms of perspective. I found this useful as perspective can really change the feel of a scene and can transform an average scene of a cup of tea for instance, into an interesting story.

Outcome

Scene 1

Scene 4

Refined storyboard for the second part of scene one

Above are the sketches which I created in the group and the first two images are my rough storyboards which lead to my more refined second part to scene one. As this was a group task we split the scenes between us and our group member Nikolay chose to be in charge of visual theme and main character design. Between us we agreed on a steampunk theme which would work with Nikolay's idea of a Victorian based scene while incorporating the idea of large supermarkets and electronic lifts. This theme would be visualised predominately through the narrator's character's costume, while also being presented through use of colour. In order to obtain a unified approach to the scenes between us as a group, I made sure to communicate with Nikolay as to his character design to ensure my refined scene would accurately represent the character.

I found this workshop to be really enjoyable, so much so as to consider storyboarding and storyboard animation as an option for my future career pursuits.