Storyboarding Animations with Illustrator on Desktop & iPad [free download]

Over the last few years I’ve worked hard to speed up and minimize my animation production time. At the same time, I obviously don’t want to sacrifice style or quality. I mean, sure I can spend forever on a project when it is basically for me. But employers and clients often think animation happens overnight…yes duh, time is money.

So this is the workflow that I’ve developed over the years. I shared a version of my storyboard workflow here (from 2016). But since then, I’ve expanded my needs and refined my process with each illustration-driven animation project that I’ve done. I’ve updated the template to reflect these changes. Additionally, as many of you know — Illustrator for iPad Pro has finally arrived!!! It feels like I bought the iPad Pro before it was even really useable FOR ME because I do almost all of my designing in Illustrator. (Why? —Photoshop files are enormous and really bog down whatever computer I am using to render animations. I also prefer to use the camera to move around the scenes and lighting with After Effects. I think that’s just because I’m also a filmmaker, so it’s just kind of how my mind works.)

Anyway, I realize there are infinite ways to do these kinds of projects and honestly I have continually tried out different methods. I would love to hear from others as to how they approach this!? I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I like sharing free tools just in case it’s helpful to anyone else.

I’ve needed a better way to display the script for each storyboard. It’s helpful for my stakeholder’s review process to be able to read along. At the same time, I cannot share enormous AI files with people that don’t use AI, so I needed a way to print to PDF and display the storyboards without modifying the size of each artboard. Obviously, I want to keep each Artboard at 1920p.

  • So I’ve created artboards within artboards and labeled them accordingly in the template as “SCRIPT”.

  • Each animatable object must be on it’s own root layer (for After Effects), so keep that in mind and stay organized with descriptive names. I tend to make a huge mess in the design phase and then spend an evening partially watching TV and renaming layers. It doesn’t interrupt my flow as much, but whatever works for you.

  • The final process is to split the main AI file into individual .eps files for each artboard, skipping the SCRIPT artboards.

  • Then you must open each .eps file in AI and save as AI.

  • Then you can just start pulling in each organized scene into After Effects.

It sounds like a lot, but an animation is exactly that
—a lot!

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Organized Script Artboards

When I have a version ready to share, I export to PDF by selecting “by artboards” and using only the artboards labeled SCRIPT. These are just the larger artboards that will print the script beneath the design in PDF.

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Big Picture of Little Pictures

Having storyboards means I can zoom out and see the big picture. I design my whole animation project in this way, so that I can maintain a cohesive style for each project (or at least try).

And now —all of this translates to the ipad with the brand new Illustrator for iPad app! Yay! You DO need to setup your project on a computer (because it’s an Illustrator Template .ait filetype). Save it to your Creative Cloud documents. Then, like magic, you can work on these giant projects with a tactile Apple Pencil instead of being chained to a desk.

Happy animating and designing, graphic friends!

Workflows-storyboard.jpg

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Illustrator Storyboard Template | Free Download

*UPDATED VERSION HERE*

I love finding holes in the internet that I can fill. I searched for an Illustrator template after discovering that is precisely what keeps causing me such huge delays in the design process when moving to After Effects.  In my efficient obsessions, I keep trying to skip that step and then my projects immediately become:

  • a tangled web of graphic files that are hard to visualize at one time

  • impossible to create a more cohesive style

  • hard to reuse elements

Sure I create color schemes and burn through post-its like a monster, but I want to be able to see them all together.  I know others do this and quite well I should add, but I've really been researching the workflow of others as well as my own and realized today that I just keep skipping it...

So this is my new workflow plan:

Workflows-storyboard

Workflows-storyboard

Anyway, I decided to make a 1080p video size animation Storyboard Template for Illustrator to force myself into this habit from now on. Thought I'd share.  Maybe someone will find it instead of spending their Saturday night formatting a grid with script notes!

If anyone finds this helpful, I'll be back with an update on using a variation on this workflow to work with Keynote animation projects...soon.

By the way, I put the scripts on one layer and backgrounds and swatches also on their own layers in the template setup so that the export to After Effects or split to their own files will make it all a little cleaner. That is THE goal in this life, right.

Use the Illustrator export "Save as" feature to split the artboards into individual scene files to make animation within After Effects possible (because the damn dynamic link is still 10 years away from dynamic).

Cheers, F