Welcome fourth installment of the Friendsgiving series where I go over the steps involved with creating an ad for Friendsgiving. For those of you who haven’t looked at the other articles yet, they are linked below, and would love it if you give them a look and let me know what you think about this series as a whole. 

In the other articles, I mention the Storyboarding process and how it saved me a lot of time in creating this ad. This storyboard was the guide that helped me stay consistent when creating this ad inside Cinema 4D. 

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1. Understanding Storyboarding in 3D Animation

Let's start with defining what storyboarding is. 

 -Image-

“A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of sequential panels or frames used to plan and visualize a narrative, project, or presentation” 
Aaron Sherman, Storyboard That

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For anyone looking for more in-depth information about Storyboarding, I recommend reading Aaron's article where he gives more background and examples. 

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2. The Storyboard Creation Process

Some Storyboards are very intricate and involve a lot of meticulous planning and visualization. That was not the case here. Creating 3D ads like this usually involves a team of people. When you have a team of people referencing one storyboard it is probably a good idea to make it as detailed as possible without confusing people. But since it was just me working on this project, I knew what the weird little illustrations meant, because I created them. 

Here is a storyboard that I created. 

-Image-

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I used Adobe Illustrator to create this storyboard. Why Illustrator? Illustrator is my favorite program to use when mapping out ideas. There is really nothing special about it, just a personal preference. 

You can use anything that you have available to get the point across. If I had to create another storyboard and I couldn’t use Illustrator I would probably use pen and paper. I know it is a bit old school, but I'm pretty good at drawing and I can produce detailed thumbnails to get my point across. 

--Image of drawn Thumbnails--

-Photoshopped onto a template-

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When drawing a storyboard by hand, you do not have to use a template like I did, you can just use a blank sheet of paper. But if you are working on the storyboard for your next ad and want to use something a little more organized, download my ***free storyboard template. 

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3. Visualizing the Narrative

I am going to be totally honest with you, I have very little experience when it comes to crafting a story that connects with people. My background is in design, and not writing. So the story probably could have been a bit better. 

But, I can tell how I used the storyboard to time and sync the story with the visuals. To do that I just typed them right under the thumbnails. 

-Image of the thumbnails with text under

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I had time markers above the thumbnails to let me know I needed to be animated through the scene. So as I was coming up with the *script, I read it out loud and timed myself to get a rough idea if I needed more or less time between frames. 

--Image of the Time Marker.--

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4. Streamlining Production Workflow

This ad is a 3d animation. The entire thing was created digitally inside of my favorite 3d animation software Cinema 4D. I have been using Cinema 4d for a while and I have gotten pretty good at it. Cinema 4D isn’t the only 3d software to use to create 3d animated ads, and to be honest, it is probably not even the best software to use for something like this but it’s the one I know how to use, which makes it the best software for me. But this is an article for storyboarding Cinema 4D. You can check out Tools of the Trade: Software Used in 3D Animation to see my favorite three animation software, or Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Friendsgiving Ad in Cinema 4D and After Effects to see more of the steps I took inside of cinema 4d to create this ad.

If you are not familiar with the 3d animation, it is a complicated and time-consuming process.

The two things that I waste a lot of time on when creating 3d animations  are (1) filling the scene with too much detail, and (2) playing and experimenting with camera angles to get something that looks exciting and cool. Which is why I decided to stick with the layouts on my storyboard to make sure I didn’t waste time in these two areas. While I was building in 3d I blocked out the environment and set up the cameras and only added detailed areas that the camera would get a close-up on.  

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5. The Storyboard and the Final Shots

I mentioned this a few times in the other articles in this series but I want to create this project in a very short timeframe, so I wanted to stick to the storyboard as much as possible to save time. 

Here are some side-by-side images of the storyboard and the final animation.

-Images