Storyboarding Process – How Clean is “Clean?” – Thumbnails, Roughs and Storyboard Clean-up Examples

SpongeBob reaches into his face to pull out his eyeballs

One of the questions I’m often asked by storyboarding students is “How clean does a cleaned-up storyboard have to be?”

 SpongeBob_Storyboard_Rough SpongeBob reaches into his face to pull out his eyeballs
The two drawings above show the difference between the cleaned-up storyboard drawing (drawn with 3B pencil on standard copy-grade storyboard paper) and the rough drawing (done in ball-point pen on a Post-It note). It’s usually fine to let some of the construction lines show through on the finals. You can’t quite see it with these scans, but there are faint sketch lines visible on all the clean-up drawings shown here.
SpongeBob pulls out his eyeballs SpongeBob_Storyboard_Rough
(These storyboard drawings are from a Burger King commercial in 2005. BK was giving out SpongeBob watches, and this was the commercial promoting them.)
  SpongeBob pulls out his eyeballs SpongeBob_Storyboard_Clean_Eyeballs-detail02
For the examples above, the rough was drawn with a Pitt brush-marker on Post-It note, then finished with 3B pencil.
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SpongeBob shows Patrick his new watch
Here’s a tiny Post-it thumbnail (above) followed by marker rough, followed by the final storyboard drawing.
 SpongeBob shows Patrick his new watch SpongeBob_Storyboard_Rough_01
SpongeBob shows Patrick his new watch
As usual, the drawing with the most life is the rough. It’s hard to keep that energy when you clean it up, but that’s the eternal challenge!
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The clean-ups shown here are actually cleaner than we usually draw for storyboards. Since these were done for an advertising campaign, I had to make sure that they looked as close to “finished art” as possible because they were being looked at by non-animation people. I wanted to show them here to demonstrate the extremes of roughs to clean-ups.
  Krabby Patties and drinks and food fall on SpongeBob
This is a good example of not drawing lots of detail until you know that the shot works. There’s no way I’m going to waste my time drawing all those falling Krabby Patties until the final drawing (below).
Krabby Patties and drinks and food fall on SpongeBob
Click on any of these drawings to see a BIG full-sized scan!
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 SpongeBob pulls out his eyeballs SpongeBob_Storyboard_Rough
SpongeBob_Storyboard_Clean SpongeBob pulls out his eyeballs
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     SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs in the Krusty Krab storyboard rough drawing
If you click on the drawing below (to see the larger version) you’ll be able to see lots of construction lines on the characters and perspective lines going through the background. These are totally acceptable in any storyboard clean-up! This is as clean as I have ever drawn (except for the SpongeBob Movie because we had so much time on that project to make the drawings perfect).
SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs in the Krusty Krab storyboard clean drawing


If you’re
interested in learning how to storyboard, check out my two-hour long DVD workshop called “Storyboard Elements”


Just
click on the DVD
for a free preview
and to
find out more!
storyboard-DVD-blog

Next time I’ll post the entire storyboard for the commercial in thumbnails, roughs and cleanups for comparison. See you then!

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