When Toon Boom Storyboard came out in June 2006, I questioned the value of storyboarding software, for four basic reasons:
- Expressive Freedom. First, the main purpose of a storyboard is to tell a story with a minimum of fuss and bother, and a maximum of verve and expressiveness. Yes, the storyboard artist does break the story into scenes and shots, thereby advancing the visual thinking process toward the final product. But the main thing is to let creativity flow, to give the characters life, expression and feeling. During storyboarding, artists should use the tools they're most comfortable with, the tools they can use without thinking about them. For many artists, that is pen or pencil and paper. For others, it may be Flash, Illustrator or Photoshop. Let the artist work in his or her favored medium for this critical creative phase of animation. This is the place to minimize technology and maximize freedom. It's the wrong place to interpose anything that could come between the artist and his or her inspiration. This would seem to argue against having any software specifically targeted at creating storyboards.
- Overview. An important function of a storyboard is to allow the viewer -- be it an investor, producer, director or animator -- to get a quick visual overview of the whole story. A computer screen is inherently the wrong place to do that, because it can't show you all the drawings at once in one long, uninterrupted sweep, the way you see them on a corkboard. Storyboard artists I questioned confirmed that they were happy with corkboards. They seemed to have little interest in storyboarding software.
- Cost. Even assuming the artist masters the storyboarding software completely, so it becomes second nature, what can storyboarding software offer that is worth $900 (Toon Boom Storyboard's list price)?
- Efficiency. Finally, if you use your animation program to create your boards, you'll also create assets, which can be integrated with maximum efficiency into the final project. If you're using Flash to animate, for instance, why not just use Flash to create your storyboard? If you're using a Toon Boom product, like Toon Boom Studio, Toon Boom Solo or Toon Boom Harmony, surely any of these programs is capable of creating storyboard art.
Despite these doubts, I went ahead with testing Toon Boom Storyboard. I liked the user interface. It was easy to get oriented and start creating storyboards. Having used the Toon Boom Studio animation software was a help, since many of the tools (such as drawing tools) and concepts (such as the use of the camera) were similar.
One big difference between Toon Boom Studio and Toon Boom Storyboard is that Storyboard forces you to think in shots and panels. In contrast, Toon Boom Studio allows you, though by no means forces you, to organize your animation into scenes. To put it another way, Toon Boom Storyboard forces you to think like a storyboard artist.
But it goes beyond that. The Storyboard timeline is a mini-storyboard (minus text elements such as dialogue). There is nothing similar in Studio. The Toon Boom Storyboard timeline0 is automatically divided into discrete shots and panels. With Storyboard, you can see what your boards are going to look like. Studio just doesn't have that capability. Clearly, this makes Storyboard a better environment for building storyboards.
In addition, Storyboard has:
- A "Panel" tab for entering dialogue, action notes, slugging (timing for the panel), and notes, for the current panel or shot. Only the information associated with this particular panel or shot is visible in this tab.
- A "Storyboard" tab where you can store a script that will be visible from all panels and shots
(The first figure above shows the Panel tab.)
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