I made a storyboard animatic (the hard way) for the Amazon Studios competition and that actually ended up helping me with my current query campaign. Someone at one of the larger agencies ended up checking out my work on AS after I mentioned the prizes I won, and they were really impressed with my test movie. They'd never heard of anything like that before and thought it was a great idea. Several people in the Industry actually told me they thought this sort of thing might really take off one day. You can view my test movie here:
Mind you, I'm not sure how effective this automated storyboard program is. Doing it the old fashioned way is a huge amount of work that requires a lot of creative solutions to overcome the limitations of the medium. And I just can't see an automated version being able to do this. Also, I think this approach is best suited to more "visual" stories like action, fantasy, sci fi, etc. And I believe the current version of the Storyteller software isn't really suitable for those types of movies.
So this new tech is quite limited, but it's also very new. And there's probably going to be a lot of improvements made. But ideally, I think this sort of thing should be a way to make the traditional approach faster and cheaper, as opposed to completely replacing it.
But regardless, I still think there's a future in test movies. But only if they're done right. A bad test movie can ruin a good script. That's why I'm very curious to see an actual storyboard made by this new software.
I tried it - honestly, if you can draw AT ALL (and I don't mean super well), you can do something like this and it probably wouldn't take much longer and it would look WAY better.
There are other storyboard tools out there, and this doesn't seem so different/original.
That being said, if you just want generic looks and places, and can't draw yourself, it's kinda cool. It will never replace storyboard artists, so no one has to worry about that (I don't think anyone was).
No, the way it works is you tell it to generate the storyboard, then go through it line by line clicking on your narrative and then watching it generate pictures. If there is a house mentioned, it comes up with a generic house, and then you can click 'change background' and see several other options. It puts people in there, but they are generic and look at you, and then you can change emotions and directions they face, etc. Which is why I say it is very similar to Frame Forge and other tools like this.
- Imagine you drew your characters, then just drew some different angles and emotions, then copied and pasted them all over with your scenes you drew. That is what this is, just with someone else having drawn these for you already, and of course they look nothing like your characters.
So, after fifteen minutes of playing with it I realized it would never be useful to me and moved on. It also took too long to load/ sometimes didn't load, so when I would try to tell the character to change position or smile, it took forever.
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