Springboard's Way of Storyboarding

good
key review info
application features
  • Main workflow
  • (12 more, see all...)

Make a script, make a storyboard

Let's say you've been bumming around for a while. Not really doing anything spectacular. You go to work to pay for the essentials, but you've been lounging about, not really motivating yourself to do anything near your full potential. So you decide that it's a good idea to sit down and write yourself a screenplay, the crazy thing is that it's actually pretty good. It's something that surprises your friends, your co-workers and yourself mostly. You get the idea that it's so good, you even go as far as convincing some of your friends to sponsor you to produce the movie. Your first step is to put your ideas on paper, which implies creating a storyboard.

If it's a storyboard you're trying to make, and you're also technologically savvy, you might want to take a look at Springboard. According to the publisher's description, it's everything you could possibly want; Springboard is a fast, light, easy-to-use Windows application for easily and quickly sketching and annotating your storyboard ideas for film, video, animation, or other dynamic media. Outline your story to organize your work; draw your storyboards with both natural-media and vector tools; import or copy and paste text and graphics from other applications; add annotation layers to show camera moves, special effects, etc.; use a multi-layer model to productively reuse content; easily edit graphics with external programs if you prefer; record frame changes and play back as an animatic in real-time; print in a variety of formats; and export to AVI, HTML or sequential image files for review or integration with other applications. Springboard keeps the process simple and organized. Springboard helps you to sketch storyboard ideas for video, animation, film or other media.

Let's get into specifics

My first introduction to Springboard left me a little surprised at the simplicity of the overall program. I guess the best way to describe Springboard is to think of Paint, without the colors, but with all the scalability and functionality of a powerful movie editor. Although meant to be used with vector tools and natural media, it's not that difficult to complete a project using your mouse (I've tried). Storyboarding is the process of producing sketches of the shots of your script. The end result looks like comic book of your film (without the speech bubbles). It helps you think about how your film is going to look since pictures communicate better than words, it will allow your camera crew to move their camera and lights, for producers to foresee problems, for the art department to know which parts of the location are going to be in shot and so on (if you ever get as far as production).

On the right hand side you get your basic tools for drawing your storyboard; pencil, eraser, quill pen, one pixel pen, text, line rectangle, zoom frame, outline arrow, etc. (basically think of Paint with a few movie tie-ins). You can even create auto-zooms and jot down camera positioning for each frame. It's a great tool for putting your ideas to paper, or in this case computer, and you can easily send your final projects as video files. If your friends or co-workers have the same program, you can all be working on the same project. A lot of options are tightly packed in this decently priced storyboard creator that's worth your time to look at.

The Good

Lots and lots of options at your disposal. The exporting to AVI is a big help and the camera adjustment with zoom capabilities make the program a good choice for scriptwriters, directors and producers without much of a budget.

The Bad

The bad part is that it's all relatively simplistic at times (which can be a mix between troublesome and helpful). The GUI could also use a little improvement.

The Truth

The truth is that this program is good for any basic story board you're willing to create, but if you'd like to get your hands on a more professional looking storyboard program, you should give 'storyboard artist' a try. That has a more in depth and overall functionality (like color) than Springboard. I'm not saying Springboard isn't worth the download, because it is and has a lot of useful features (camera positioning, zooming, exporting to AVI and more) and it's worth the price. I'm also not saying that one desperately needs color for a storyboard since you can convey an idea without color. I'm just saying that you might want to look at other storyboard programs that are similar to Springboard.

Check out the screenshots below.

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user interface 3
features 4
ease of use 4
pricing / value 3


final rating 3
Editor's review
good
 
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