Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Storyboards are so last century

Storyboarding is So last century.

The buzzword replacing the age old cell based storyboard plan is Pre-Visualization. Going beyond just planning the camera frames contemporary pre-vis encompasses a broad range of processes and tools with a palette of aims; framing, colour style, production design, animatics, camera motion, blocking and more. In simple terms Pre-Vis encompasses anything that endevours to articulately plan the production.

Not only is Pre-Vis an enormously creative process it's also a quickly expanding part of the creative industries with huge employment potential and growth.

Animation World magazine has an interesting article on Pre-Vis for indie films. And this article from XSIBase talks about the importance of Pre-Vis in high-end Hollywood.

Here's my pick of the best free tools for pre-vis on the net.

Google Sketchup is a 3D modeling software tool that is perfect for building pre-visualizations for film projects. It allows you to easily and quickly layout 3D environments and spaces and plan camera movements and framings. Sketchup also draws upon the huge Google 3D model library saving you the need to build models from scratch. 100% free and cross-platform. Storyboarding is so last century. sketchup.google.com

Antics3D is an extremely powerful 3D Machinima and pre-visualization application that provides every posisbl feature for building, animating and ’shooting’ in 3D space. The BasePack version is 100% free and is able to import models from the Google Sketchup library. www.antics3d.com

Kuler is a dynamic colour palette utility for coordinating and selecting colour in swatch groups. It allows you to build co-ordinated colour groups and themes and is an excellent tool for production designers to hep with pre-visualization and collaborative communication between design departments such as wardrobe, set and props. kuler.adobe.com

MoodStream is an incredibly dynamic and flexible media brainstorming and visualization tool. Built form the massive archives of Getty Images, MoodStream allows you to assemble and collect together images, video and sounds into palettes of media. A superb tool for production designers as well as motion graphics artists looking to trigger new ideas of image assembly. Similarly for Directors and Producers MoodStream can be an amazing tool for preparing a visualization package to help illustrate visual concepts and ideas to the production team. moodstream.gettyimages.com

Directors Boards is a very useful A/V storyboarding and script management tool. Perfect for those who like to storyboard with digital photos Uses a FileMaker Pro engine but doesn’t require FileMaker to be installed. (Win, Mac) http://www.directorsnotebook.com/

and of course

Celtx is the creative development tool of the digital age. 100% Open Source and Free to download and use. Apart form its comprehensive scripting, breakdown and scheduling tools Celtx also has a solid storyboard systems and suppourt for embedding still image, video and sound files. www.celtx.com

Posted at 12:00AM Jul 16, 2008 by Mike Jones in 3D graphics & gaming  |  Comments[1]