For part IV of our process, I want to go into storyboards and how they can make a big impact when it comes to deciding on the direction and art style of your final video. There are almost as many ways to generate storyboards as there people. From simple hand drawn sketches to fully realized ‘snapshots’ of a particular scene.
Here at A Single Click, we prefer the latter. There’s just something about having a formed picture as to how a particular scene looks that allows us to refine it before we ever start moving pixels around a screen and that means fewer revisions and delays than if we guessed randomly as we went along. Of course, if there is a particular style of animation that you are interested in then we are happy to use that as a reference when working on a new storyboard.
“A Thousand Words”
If a picture can is said to be worth a thousand words then an animation must be a library. Of course, we must use words with the storyboard to make sure you understand what kind of motion we are picturing and how we are envisioning the scene forming and changing. For this reason, we are careful to add descriptors to each panel and make sure that our clients understand how we got from A to B.
Here’s an example:
Timing
A common question we receive is, ‘how long will it take to create the first draft of a storyboard?’ Typically, it will take 5 – 7 business days, but can be completed in as little as 3 days based on availability and workload of our illustrators and designers. If a project must be completed by a certain timeframe then we offer a rush service for an additional fee.
Currently, we have an average of one revision per finished storyboard, typically revisions include small changes and scene edits but can stretch to re-designing an entire scene. However, the factor that has the biggest impact on how quickly or slowly the creative process will be is determined by the client. If they are handing off the creative workload to us or have a very rigorous and defined idea then the process is usually faster than those who are unsure about how they want the video to look but want a high degree of control over the final feel.