A Novel Approach to 3D Storyboarding

Creatives in the animation and film industries constantly explore new and innovative tools and methods to enhance their creative process, especially in pre-production. As realistic, real-time rendering techniques have emerged in recent years, 3D game engines, modeling, and animation tools have been exploited to support storyboarding and movie prototyping. This research proposes a 3D storyboarding tool to improve existing storytelling approaches. A novel storyboarding pipeline is proposed, which can automatically generate a storyboard including camera details and a textual description of the events occurring in each scene. Users create storyboards by selecting actors, performing available actions, positioning the camera in the 3D scene, and taking screenshots to save a vignette of the storyboard; the corresponding description is generated based on the actors’ actions and their status. A software implementation of the proposed pipeline has also been developed in the guise of a 3D desktop application aimed at expert and novice storyboarders. The system has been tested to evaluate its usability. Preliminary results confirm that the users have appreciated the application.