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You’re under a tight deadline; you need to get to work immediately on this project. So you decide to skip the pre planning process. You might think it’s a
good idea, right? Not at all. You absolutely need to preplan your production in as much detail as you possibly can and communicate that to the client
and your other team members. This also provides a way to have your clients sign off on the pre planning portion of your production. One typical
technique for preplanning is called storyboarding this comes from the film and feature animation industry. Essentially a storyboard is a series of
panels put together to create a graphical description of what your final production will look like. Storyboarding provides a visualization of the
story you’re telling in your production. The storyboard is usually created in a sketch format; it can be very detailed colored drawings, a series of
watercolor paintings, or it can be extremely simple and look like a series of stick figure sketches. You’ll need to determine what’s going to work best for
both you and your client for the particular production you’re working on. The most important thing is that you do not skip this step in the
process. The level of detail that goes into the storyboard is again dependent on how well you know the client, how well the trust you, whether or
not you’ve done this type of work before, and how complex the production is going to be. One level of detail in the storyboarding process might be a
couple of sketches of key frame information. Essentially you’ll describe in visual format what happens in each scene and in what sequence.
You will learn some of the terminology as we get a little further into the process. You may also have other information within a storyboard frame, you
may have camera information, color and material information in the storyboard panels, you may have cues for animations within each store board panel.
Is an object going to rotate a little bit at some point, it’s these sorts of things that you’ll need to determine whether or not they need to be in the
storyboard. Keep in mind do not skip on information that will help communicate your idea to the client. Another very important aspect to
understand at the very beginning of the pre planning process is how you will output your final result. Will the final product go to video; will it go to
still images for print or web? If you’re going out to print or web you need to know the file type and you need to know the resolution. Very high resolution
images can take a very long time to render, so you need to know ahead of time if you need that high of a resolution image. If you’re going out to animation,
you add more complexity to the process of output. So it becomes even more important to understand the process. One option for animations is the
codec or compressor decompressor, the codec handles the compression of the still images into a single animation file. You need to understand
whether or not your client has the ability to read the file that you create and whether the quality is high enough for your needs. Are you going out to the
web for a small animation or are you doing high resolution animation for high definition video? All these aspects need to be evaluated and agreed
upon before you start any content creation for your production. Keep in mind, do not skip the pre planning stage, but make it an appropriate level of
detail for the size and scope of your animation production.