02/27/2025
Hello everyone! So I'd originally written this several times throughout the week but as issues continued to rise and rise I felt it would be best rewrite this in a better, more cohesive way.
So lets go back to the beginning of the week, where everything started. The first day of the week I had begun adjusting the script one more time. I finally cut down a majority of the story the way I like, and even though the script itself is still unpolished grammatically it was finally at a point to board.
Thus started the whole series of events that led up to the rest of this week.
My first issue was finding a storyboard program to use. My desired program was storyboard pro, as from hours of research I had concluded would be the best fit for the type of work I wanted to do.
The issue was that storyboard Pro is both an expensive program to rent, and also a taxing program for my particular computer. I figured I would get storyboard Pro at the start of next month when my paycheck came in, but I couldn't just not do work for a week, that would be asking for trouble.
In the meantime I would begin working in a substitute program and then switch over the workload. So after some research I'd found a free program that looked/reacted very similarly to storyboard pro. It's called storyboarder, and if I could give you one crucial piece of advice, don't use it. Ever.
Here is an image of the program, which on first inspection appears relatively normal:
At first storyboarder worked amazingly well, and I began making my boards from the beginning, working straight ahead using the scripts and thumbnail panels. In retrospect that was my second issue, I should have worked in more broad strokes, building up the boards in a way that would get more work done, but unfortunately I only now realize that. Within the first 40 panels though I realized that storyboarder will crash if you flip through panels too fast. Not too terrible, unless you're trying to properly time your boards in real time, which I did. Within the next hour I began to spot another potential issue, that being that storyboarder only lets you use one layer per frame. There are such thing as reference layers, but they're more for reference than proper layering. This means that drawing backgrounds all happens in one central layer, and when creating multiple different backgrounds for scenes, even rough, I would have to painstakingly erase things for my character drawings.
At this point I should have realized that storyboarder was not going to work and move on, but I was persistent in the notion that this program had to work, so nevertheless I carried on. Within the next few hours I began to encounter error after error. From the autosave (which is forcefully on and has no ability to be turned off) breaking my files multiple times, to layers deleting themselves for no reason, to the script randomly not applying itself to the scene to finally exporting issues. My final straw was the exporting issues, when I went to test the video speed of the storyboards, I began to get errors that despite claiming to be able to export to video, the video feature was broken. I now had to either export my work as a gif, individual image sequences, or continue working in storyboarder.
At this point I threw in the towel, storyboarder could no longer do what I desired and I would have to find alternative means to an end.
Thus came the new problem:
What do I do next?
At first I figured I would work in photoshop, but then I quickly realized that despite my years of experience in photoshop, I've never done animation esque work in it. I figured working in another program I was sort of unfamiliar with, even if I trust it, would be bad, so I immediately switched to clip studio paint.
Here comes the final, and ultimate, mistake I made. After importing all the frames I'd made, I realized that all the work I'd done in storyboarder, all the work I'd spent tireless hours trying to force into working, looked bad. The characters looked inconsistent constantly in size, shape language, and outfit wise. The compositions were sub-par at best, and everything about this just screamed messy and unorganized. I realized the only logical thing I could do was redraw all the frames again, but this time more clean and organized.
Which has resulted in to today, where I have barely any frames done..
So, originally I was going to leave this post here, but I realized I'd never submitted this, and figured I should post an update. I went to my class and presented my workload, and as expected there was a fair bit to say about the workload I had provided for the week. All very kind and generous things, but that made me think. After some self reflection on my part I know that I made a lot of mistakes this week, but also I think I know how I am going to turn this around.
Step 1: rough animatic.
I'm going to take a step back and take all my really rough thumbnails and turn them into a fully fledged/timed animatic and add sound to them, that way I can gauge how much time the shots are going to take.
Step 2: Find a better storyboard program
Just as the step says, I'm going to find a better storyboard program, whether it be storyboard pro or something else, and I am going to watch many tutorial videos learning about it over the week to better prepare myself.\
Step 2.5: Find more compositional reference videos to better help with compositions.
Step 3: Reorganize and re-prioritize:
From here I'm going to begin work on the bulk of rough composition work. Beginning with blocking out shots and scenes so that I know where everything is going to go and when.
This week may have started very rough, but I believe there is a path forward here. My goal is to make a complete turnaround here by next week, and to get back on track on completing this workload on time.
I'll post the shoddy animatic I've got so far, just so you know where I'm headed, thank you so much for your time, and I'll see y'all next week!
