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

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

 

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.

(These storyboard drawings are from a Burger King commercial in 2005. BK was giving out SpongeBob watches, and this was the commercial promoting them.)

 

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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Here’s a tiny Post-it thumbnail (above) followed by marker rough, followed by the final storyboard drawing.

 

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.

 

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).

Click on any of these drawings to see a BIG full-sized scan!

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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).

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!

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