The storyboard is what happens between the idea and the final result.
A storyboard?
When you have an idea, it is sometimes not so simple to make a comic strip, a cartoon or a movie. To do this, before launching into the final result, we can go through several stages that allow us to gradually clarify what we would like to do. For example, if I have the idea of a sheep that skis, I need to have a sheep, skis and a camera to make a film or paper and pencil to make a comic strip. But it's useful to go through a drawing first, a sketch. Well, the storyboard is, in a way, the sketch of the comic strip or the film.
It consists of drawings and sentences, placed side by side. "Story" and "board" means also "guidance". The storyboard is a dashboard, a guide. This way the producers, actors and production workers of the film have an overview before shooting, the designers have an idea of what it might look like, what problems they might encounter, what is worth drawing, before they go to the final board.
How do you make a storyboard?
You don't have to make precise drawings.
There is a multitude of ways to make a storyboard, portrait or landscape format page, small or large boxes, rectangles or squares, no boxes...etc.
Some do not go through this step, but it allows, especially when the project is complex, to save time. The principle is to know, if we keep the boxes and then determine the size and layout of the texts and characters before going to the final. If you don't do this, you risk wasting five hours deciding on the shape, the color, the mountain when you wouldn't have needed to draw it at all because you would realize, but too late, that it will be hidden by the text!
This step also allows, when we start a complex project, to jump the step of the blank page. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to take your pencil and draw something when you have the idea, not of a sheep skiing, but of Lydia in a post-apocalyptic world who fights the Combronos which are yellow and slimy balls of matter... let's not go any further, it's time to draw the outline of the story and then to make some sketches and a storyboard!
If you want to learn how to make a comic book, Apolline offers coaching during her Manga classes in Lausanne, Etoy and Montreux.
For a more intensive training over a week, don't hesitate to register for the February 2022 courses - BD/Manga, in Lausanne, Montreux, Etoy, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Yverdon, Sion and Fribourg