Scenes! Collapsible groups of shots/folders, etc.

[morganwk]

I just started using Storyboarder last night and it's already my favorite way to storyboard and animate stuff. It's just so wonderful so far.

Anyway, seeing as it's in an early beta, it's obviously going to be missing some key features. I searched around the current issues list for this one and I couldn't find it, so I decided to write a post. Sorry if I'm being redundant without realizing.

The number one thing that I feel is missing from Storyboarder at the moment is scene support.

So far, I've storyboarded an entire scene from a film I'm making this winter break - and it worked fantastically. And then when it came time to board the scenes before and after it, I realized this was missing.

Storyboarder needs a way to organize a project by scenes, groups, folders, etc. - so that the timeline doesn't become cluttered. I have 25 "shots" in the scene I sketched last night, so the thumbnails on the timeline already extend far beyond the reaches of my screen. If I boarded an entire short film in this manner, it would be nearly impossible to navigate.

My proposed solution is to either have groups and folders of shots that are collapsible (and possibly to have a viewable folder structure hierarchy) or to have official scene support where you can load only shots from a given scene.

[audionerd]

Have you tried creating a Storyboarder project based on a Fountain script?

Storyboarder can import the scene descriptions from Fountain scripts. The scenes will show up on the left side of the app. Then you can select which scene you want to work on, and only work on boards from that scene.

To take it further, we could allow you to create new scenes from within Storyboarder. I don't think that will be part of 1.0, but it's a great idea for 2.0.

[morganwk]

I suppose that could help, but I intend to storyboard first, script later (at least for most of my projects) and having to make a script in order to create a scene structure within Storyboarder seems like a workaround that shouldn't be a workaround.

I'll check it out and see how the functionality works out for me. However, I feel like doing this from within Storyboarder should be considered core functionality, especially for larger projects.

[morganwk]

I tried it out and I like it so far but two things are very frustrating to me:

• I can't create, remove, or rearrange scenes from within Storyboarder (this is a dealbreaker if you ask me);
• When done playing a scene, it doesn't continue playing the next scene like you'd expect it to.

[audionerd]

One small improvement we're about to release: Storyboarder will update automatically whenever your .fountain file changes. This will be in Beta 13.3.

[morganwk]

Good to know.

Is there any way at present to change the scene structure without abandoning already drawn boards? If not, I'll make do, but if I'm missing features, I'd like to know.

[setpixel]

It doesn't destroy boards at all, it just updates the script on the side. in the worst case, you can add a scene and you'll have to go to that scene, but you will lose nothing! I think you'll see when it is released.

[edwonedwon]

Thumbs up for this feature. I often have many many boards for one shot, almost akin to animation (still very rough) but it would be great to be able to collapse these into one "shot" or group that would then make it easier to navigate a long timeline. I imagine this acting similar to sub-comps in After Effects.

Having these "sub-comps" or "groups" be infiitely nestable would be helpful as well, because then you could just have your top level "scenes" for the whole movie, then within each scene could be sub-scenes, within each sub-scene are shots, and within those are frames.

The point is to let the user decide what to do with these nestable items, and please don't impose one way of working upon users.