Boords Review

Making the storyboard process fun, quick and more effective

Storyboarding is one of the most crucial stages of any motion graphics or animation project. You get to methodically plan the composition, key visuals and even the timing for the animation. A well-produced storyboard allows you to then share your vision with your team and the client. Often, this will be the first time the client can truly visualise the flow of an animation. This gives them confidence to sign it off, ensuring they can’t just change their mind halfway through (without paying). I’ve worked at places that think it’s better for their margin to skip this step but all this does is put the client in a position where they can change any aspect of the animation. This could just be a few scenes or the whole thing. Including them in the process from the start ensures the entire production runs smoothly.

The not-so-fun aspect of storyboarding

I’ve always produced my storyboards with Adobe InDesign. Sure it looks slick and professional but if the client comes back with changes it is a pain. If they want a few frames added in the middle of a scene, I have to go through the laborious task of moving each frame along one by one. It’s just horrible and takes the fun out of the process. You dread receiving an email where the client wants to make changes. This, in turn, stifles the project’s potential. Very rarely will you produce a storyboard that’s perfect the first time round. Ideally, you want to be able to quickly create storyboards that can easily be edited and updated and then shared with the client.

Introducing Boords

I’m currently working on a 5-minute animation. Yes, 5 minutes. The storyboarding process was so important and I dreaded working in InDesign. Then I found Boords. This honestly is the biggest game changer for me. It’s a web app storyboarding tool that is powerful and quick at the same time.

Easy peasy

It’s just so quick and easy to add, edit and delete boards. Let’s pretend the client comes in and completely mixes up the order. No sweat, just drag and drop them into the new order. But what if they want to add in 10 new frames? Simple, just drag the cursor between the frames and a button pops up allowing you to add frames. It really is just so easy.

Share the goodness

Once you’ve created your latest storyboards, you can easily share them with the team or the client. It’s very impressive to see the plethora of choices here. You can send over a link or Boords will even let you create a PDF with your own branding on. Also, you can even customise the layout etc to best suit the project. If you send over the link, the client can leave feedback on each frame. They’ve literally thought of everything.

You can even create an animatic. No, seriously!

I signed up to Boords before I even knew this was a thing but this one really blew my mind. You can create, edit, download and share animatics. Before I’d have to create it in After Effects but this simplifies the whole process. The fact you can go in and edit the timing of the animatic is just genius! Once you’re happy with it you can download it as an MP4 file.

Not just a tool for storyboarding

There are loads of other ace features, like being able to edit the script alongside the storyboard and have it update in the boards. They literally have thought of everything and this makes the whole storyboarding process so much fun. Instead of programs like InDesign restricting you, this web app gives you complete flexibility to just focus on the most important part – making your storyboards look awesome.

This isn’t a sponsored post, I just really love this app and you can even sign up for a free account. Find out more here