Digital Video, the R&D branch of the 2D software Toonz, has announced the release of Story Planner and Story Planner Pro. The new application is a tool for creating storyboards with graphical and textual information, and generating animatics with soundtrack and animations.
Developed on the base of expert storyboard artists' suggestions, Story Planner is a fundamental management tool to facilitate the creative thinking process simplifying the workflow in cinema, advertising, animation and videogames industries, increasing the production speed, saving time and costing.
Story Planner allows a streamlined creation of a storyboard with sketches and notes laid out in an unlimited number of panels describing the flow of the story. Sketches can be created with a full set of raster-based drawing tools, or any image can be imported; captions and notes can be added and formatted. The story flow can be quickly organized in panels and scenes; camera movements and other graphical elements can be used to define actions in the scenes. Storyboards can be printed out, or exported as PDF files, according to a custom page layout.
Story Planner PRO adds to the standard features the possibility to compose complex animatics in a timeline editor. Moreover, the timeline controls the animation of the camera and of graphical elements placed in sketch layers. Audio tracks can be added and edited to create a sound track in sync with the animatic, and fade and dissolve transitions can be used. After a real-time preview, the animatic can be generated with a single-click command.
Both versions are available for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X running on both PowerPC and Intel processors.
Information: www.toonz.com.
