Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animation Features and Shorts

10

Starting Story Sketch: Compose Yourself

Tonal Sketches

At this point you have a rough story idea and rough character designs to act it out.

The verbal blueprint for your project must now be translated into visuals. A rough character lineup (such as the one in Figure 7-4) or an atmospheric sketch sets the characters’ scale to each other, to the background, and to important props. Placeholders such as the ones in Figure 10-1 are used to stage the action and acting on the boards if character designs have not yet been finalized.

[Fig. 10-1] Very rough drawings will read as the same character if the silhouette values are good. This woman’s headdress ...