What exactly is a storyboard? If you use a novel as an analogy, it is equivalent to writing.

The minimum standard storyboard is enough to be able to tell the story in pictures and not be misunderstood. And there are too many things to master for a good storyboard.

If you want to learn storyboarding well, it's not wrong to watch more movies. Because comic storyboards were originally born out of movie storyboards.

Top-down lens, up-down lens, fisheye lens...... Wait a minute. In order to use these techniques, you must first know what each of these lenses is and what they mean.

For example, if you want to show that a person is tall and mighty, you can use looking up at the camera, and if you want to show that a person is small and helpless, you can use looking down at the camera. If you want to show the vastness and grandeur of the scene, you can use a bird's-eye view.

However, the storyboard of a movie needs to consider the camera position and scheduling, while comics and animation can be imaginative. For example, a shot that enters the window from the side of the car, passes in front of the driver, and then comes out of the window on the other side, which cannot be filmed in reality, but the animation director can use such a shot with impunity.

Another difference in the storyboard of the comic is that the comic has a grid.

The grids of the storyboard are divided into horizontal, vertical, and oblique grids. Among them, the horizontal grid gives people a sense of stability and silence, and the vertical grid gives people a sense of sudden insertion. On the other hand, the oblique grid is unstable dìng, an uncomfortable feeling, and is often used in action scenes.

How to assign the lattices so that they look beautiful to read should also be related to reality. For example, a comic published in a magazine is open to the page. The cartoonist will then design a storyboard based on the effect of two pages placed together. And the cartoon on the scarf will not pay attention to this.

What Li Er painted was the long shot he had just seen. There are a lot of images in the whole shot, and there are more than 100 pictures in 124 frames per second.

Drawing it into a mirror requires a trade-off.

The first is fast!

The sword qi flew out of a square, and then the screen turned, and the sword qi deceived the demon king.

And then there's the slow!

Close-up of the Demon King's eyes, sideways. A panorama of nearly two-thirds of the page jumped, and the sword qi passed by. Below are three vertical grids side by side, the rhythm of the hair, the toes and the sword qi missed, and the sword qi cut through the skirt corners.

The first frame, the medium and long view of the back perspective, indicates that the demon king has landed. The second grid is still, and the third grid is howling with strong winds, cutting the grass and trees in the background to pieces!

As soon as it is still and moving, this reflects the rhythm of the picture!

Li Er put the pen aside, and realized something in his heart. The so-called action storyboard is mainly in three stages!

That's the beginning of the action! the process of the action!

As long as these three images are drawn, an action is fully reflected in the reader's mind.

For example, the storyboard just now can be completely simplified into three squares!

The sword qi is out of one grid, the character dodges in one square, and the character lands in one square.

The rest of the slots are added to that!

Li Er continued to work hard and turned the entire animation into a storyboard of the comics. Although his drawing skills are average, he mainly needs to practice the ability of storyboards, so it doesn't matter if he draws well or not.

This process of re-translation allowed Lear to comprehend something. Although the anime is a reference to the original manga, it cannot be copied from the original after all. And after he turned this part of the shot into a comic, it was different from the original.

Compared to the original, the storyboards he drew had parts that were better handled, and some parts that were less handled than the comics. Li Ertong guò compared himself with the author's original comic works in the north, and gained more understanding.

So he suddenly thought, why not "translate" the animation from the small TV into a comic?

Just do it. Li Er opened the latest very popular new episode called "One Punch Man", opened the progress bar, and drew it directly.

This time he wanted to get a little more finished, so he made a pencil for the draft.

……

Violent explosions tore through the calm of the city, and thick smoke billowed over the blue sky. Panicked passers-by, the sudden appearance of a deep pit.

The strange man with horns on his head, resembling the great demon king of the piccolo, jumped out of the deep pit, and in the inclined diagonal grid, the strange man stayed in the air, and three light bullets instantly formed in front of his body. The light projectile arced into the distance, provoking a series of even more terrifying explosions.

He fell, and a little girl who had lost her parents wept in front of him. He walked slowly, a series of horizontal bars that slowed the process slowly and eerily.

The strange man stretched out his hand, as if to help the little girl, but in the next square, the hand suddenly turned into a hideous claw.

The backlight hit the monster's huge body, and the little girl below was so weak and fragile compared to his huge claws. Snapping, claws mercilessly closing.

"Who?"

The dust clears. A bald man in an old-fashioned Superman cloak puts down the little girl and looks at the weirdo with a cute expression.

"I am, a hero of interest. ”

……

After drawing the entire comic in one go, Li Er rubbed his sore wrist. When he looked at his watch, it was already twelve o'clock, and he had been drawing for nearly eight hours unknowingly?

Together, I found that my arm was sore, and it didn't look like it was my own. He hurriedly sat down again, poking his arm with his already stiff fingers. As a result, he grinned.

The fingers holding the water-based pen were sunken and couldn't bounce up for half a day. It seems that he really worked too hard today.

Looking at the finished product on the desk, the pencil manuscript on it has not been erased, and the lines have not changed in thickness, and sometimes there are many unnecessary miscellaneous lines on the edges.

The drawing skills are not very good. In the eyes of Li Er, who is accustomed to reading the manuscripts drawn by professional cartoonists, it is simply worse than the ground.

But he painted it himself.

It's like a first-time cooking, but it's not as delicious as someone else's, but it's still very special.

When the soreness in his arm eased a little, Li Er picked up the manuscript and flipped through it page by page.

I have corrected it over and over again when I drafted it, and I have no problem reading it fluently. The drawing is also trying to do the best he can do, although it is still not as good as the professionals, but Li Er is already very satisfied.

While watching, he also compared the original storyboard in the comic book part of the beep station. The first episode of the original work is relatively straightforward, and it comes up with a big panoramic explosion. And he drew it after the beginning of the anime, so it felt more like a movie.

There are some similar storyboards, such as when the weirdo appears, the method of character overflow is chosen. That is, the character is placed on top of the lattice. This can highlight the character and is generally used for the appearance of important characters, and more important moments.

For example, in some basketball comics, when the character shoots and scores, the character will overflow and put the shooting action on the grid.

Then the monster's hand deformed two horizontal squares of the same size, which also collided here.

Followed by the most ** and flashpoint part of this short story, Saitama's famous line - "I, I am a hero motivated by interest." ”

Here, Li Er uses a panoramic view, looking down from top to bottom, and the light and shadow at an angle of 45 degrees from the side to the top will make the figure appear solemn and frontal. The face is a comic expression, which creates a contrast.

The frame of the famous line is placed in the diagonal upper corner corresponding to the cloak, above the hand. This design also makes it easier for the audience to notice the line as soon as they turn the page.

After the comparison, Li Er was very satisfied with his first storyboard. Although there are many differences from the original, it can only be said that there are two ways to deal with it. It's like cooking with salty and sweet dishes, there is no right or wrong, only a matter of personal taste.

However, if he is the only one to watch, it may be a bit biased. His ideas alone do not represent the public. Maybe there was something else he didn't find?

Do you want to look for Teacher Gao Qiao? No, no, no, don't bother the teacher, the teacher is now going to draw a new card, and he has to draw the original manuscript at the back, and he sleeps less than five hours a day. Lear didn't want to add to his workload.

And colleagues in the company, let alone not. If they really want to give you an evaluation, Lear doesn't know whether to listen to it or not. After all, working in the same company, it feels like everyone is on an equal footing. When you encounter comments that you are not convinced, it seems that it is not good to accept his advice with a clear conscience or quarrel with others.

Don't let the other editors know that they drew comics.

So where else can he receive reviews from manga lovers?

There's no way he's going to take it and submit it. Let's not talk about whether voting for other magazines is considered a mutiny, let's just say that his painting skills are estimated to not be able to pass the preliminary examination.

It's impossible on the physical side, but what about the website?

Huaxia has a website called "Let's Become a Cartoonist", which has only been built in recent years. At first, only a few comic beginners, or fanart artists, serialized their own comics on it. Because the above comics are free to read, slowly, it has also accumulated a certain amount of popularity.

Among them, the comic "Ghost Eye", which has the highest clicks, has more than 20 million hits. And the physical book was released, and it sold well.

However, in China, the first choice of the best cartoonists is still the major comic magazines. So "Let's become a cartoonist" has never become popular.

The editors of the weekly Shangjing Youth are also aware of the site, but 80 percent of them do not see such a site as a threat.

But Lear didn't think so.

The disadvantage of a website over a magazine is only in the content. If a website has as many good cartoonists as magazines, then their low cost and the ability to read online for more people at the same time are all advantages.

Compared to a magazine corresponding to one reader, a website can be viewed by millions or even tens of millions of readers at the same time.

Traditional magazines also need printing costs, distribution costs, and many other intermediate links. However, the website can completely omit these costs and directly output its own cultural content point-to-point!

In Li Er's view, the way to read comics in the future is not like this!

It's just that "let's become a cartoonist" is not very clear about its positioning of how to make money. At present, it is still a route that popularizes authors → helps authors contact physical booksellers → take a cut from them. Then it's a matter of relying on traffic to collect some advertising fees.

But that's not something for Lear to worry about. "Let's become a cartoonist" Although there are so many problems, the daily traffic is also well-deserved NO.1 on the comic website. If you want to get the reader's opinion, it is best to publish it here.

He opened the profile page of "Let's Become a Manga Artist" and selected the new account in the white square at the top of the pure white background. In the pseudonym column, he hesitated for a long time......

Finally, he suddenly remembered the name of his favorite popsicle when he was a child, so he typed these four words:

Salt water popsicles.