Storeoboard

This project was part of my PhD Thesis.

The paper discussing this project in detail can be downloaded from here

Storeoboard: Sketching Stereoscopic Storyboards

Back when I was starting my PhD, I was interested in the area of film, and pre-production. By fluke, there just happened to be an international conference on the Stereoscopic 3D medium happening that year. I have to admit, I didn't really belive in stereo 3D when I signed up to go to the conference, but trying to hone in on a topic for my PhD, I figured it wouldn't hurt to understand that side of the industry.

What blew me away while attending the conference, was that I learned that the 3D community actually knew how to make good stereo films. That the awful 3D experiences that were being churned out by Hollywood were avoidable. The underlying factor that came up again, and again, was that to avoid the mistakes, one simply had to plan properly from the beginning as there were different considerations for stereo compared to traditional film.

The catch was...there really were no digital tools to properly plan for stereo 3D content...at least not in the earliest phases of planning. People could use 3D computer models, and virtual cameras to try out different "previs" shots, but these were slow and expensive to setup. If you were trying to do things quickly, there was no good option.

This led me to wonder if it would be possible to create a storyboard tool that artists could use with minimal training to sketch in stereo 3D

There were multiple challenges with creating a stereoscopic storyboard tool, first question was would it even work? After all, one's hand will be constantly occluding part of the image, never mind the pen. Further, where will the user be drawing? If they're drawing behind or in front of the screen, the pen point and the line created wouldn't be aligned. If you move the volume so you're always drawing on the screen you'll be drawing with lines floating in front of, or behind the screen. Would someone sketching visually accept this, or must one draw first, then convert later (which would partly defeat the purpose)?

These first questions were fairly easy to check. First, I decided it would be more disorienting if the pen wasn't drawing on the surface, so I moved the drawing volume so that one was always drawing on the surface:

Next, I created a simple drawing program that allowed me to create an image like this:

I drew a sine-wave like line on the screen, then moved it forward. When I went to draw on a plane further back, I new this approach was going to work. In trying to draw the second line, I found that I had no idea where the actual physical screen really was, and my pen went right past the line that was now floating in space. This was an exciting moment!

However, another important question I needed to figure out was, would it be possible to create a tool that was fast enough for storyboard artists to use? If there was a lot of extra work invovled, it would slow them down too much. After all, it's not uncommon for artists to draw a rough panel in less than 5 seconds. If this was to be practical, the system needed to not take extra time; or if it did, very minimal extra time. In the end, I adopted an approach that treated the drawing volume as a stack of transparent sheets. One could select the depth at which they would like to draw, and simply start drawing.

Some of earliest drawings I did were by rotoscoping images as can be seen in the following two examples:

The plane approach obviously worked! Now I needed to consider other depth cues.

Over the course of a couple of years, I obtained direct hands-on feedback from a professional storyboard artist, interviewed professional storyboard artists and directors, and held a session with a group of students studying to be storyboard artists at a local college. With each itteration, I honed and improved the technique until I ended up with a program that was used on a professional film shoot.

Following are some examples of images that were made throughout the course of the journey.

The following images were created by Nas Pasha

Here are some short storyboard created by the students from the local college:

Finally, here's part of a storyboard from the film A Frosty Affair, which was originally titled "40 Below and Falling" (image courtesy of 12pt Media)