How helpful is story-boarding in your opinion?

Here’s a bit of an odd open ended question for you.
Personally i like story boards, but i have never been able to really follow through with using them because i was so excited about what i was making i had it all in my head (Film classes though, not animation)

And so recently here i’m trying to make an animation with a story i’m not overly passionate about and really had to sit down and think through what was going to happen. I wrote a good 4-5 page outline of the events and some dialogue to figure out how the animation would play out.

And it’s left me wondering how helpful a storyboard is compared to a written outline. I mean, i mentioned camera angles in the outline when i really knew which i wanted, but if i have a 5 page outline how much more helpful would a story board be?

Just wondering what you’re experiences are with them (:

I highly recommend you read through “shot by shot” by Steven D. Katz.
I think, that you will need a storyboard for the best story telling results. In my experience only the flow preview of the storyboard can show you things, you would never be able to see with only the script.
[Tiny example next to millions: drawing various shots reveals, that a good shot flow wouldn’t highlight an object in the scene with is necessary and important for the rest. This could lead to figuring out how to alter the scene, or if this would be a serious problem, find another scene, or make the object appear earlier/later/elsewhere and the change the entire plot accordingly. (Obviously this is extreme to make my idea clear)].

Conclusion: Better make one =D. Katz mentions, that although our imaginations often seems like it, the visualizations (“daydreams”) in our heads are never ready to be presented to an audience.

Animation is a visual medium. Sooner or later in the process of making an animation or a film, you have to confront the reality of what your ideas look like on a screen.

Take your five page outline, and built a minimalist set (a large ground plane.) Then add minimalist characters (rectangular prisms with icosphere heads.) Block out the motions using the characters moving around on the ground plane, with your camera angles, adjust the timing so there is enough time for the dialog and the action, set the viewport to ‘camera’ and make a viewport render (OpenGL render button) of your animation.

Viewport renders are pretty fast, so you can get a feeling for what your animation will be like when you have all the sets and models and lighting done. Anyway, you’ll probably find shots you want to break up with reaction shots, or to jump back and forth between characters talking, or to show close-ups of props (cubes of varying sizes), or to vary the camera location.

Make your adjustments to the animatic (that’s what this is called) and render it again, as many times as needed to really work out the timing and the shot list.

Now, this process will take somewhat longer than drawing a series of storyboards would take, and it is harder to work with if you are collaborating with others (you can’t just unpin a drawing from a cork board and pin it somewhere else to see how it looks as you can with storyboard drawings) but it does give you a lot more information than a storyboard can, and you may prefer it when working solo.