I’m not sure if I’ll get an iPad Pro or not, but I still do use my iPad Air for storyboarding. I save my boards to Dropbox, and I edit and animate them with Prolost Boardo.
Boardo is still one my my very favorite tools I’ve created. If you haven’t looked at it, please do. It’s a set of presets for After Effects that make it incredibly easy, and even fun, to edit and animate a moving storyboard, or “board-o-matic” — and I’ve updated it today with some cool new features.
I still use the Noteshelf app and these templates for drawing my iPad storyboards, but lately I’ve also started using the wonderful Paper from FiftyThree (with their Pencil stylus — not to be confused with Apple's). They’ve just announced an update with iPad Pro support.
What’s fun about storyboarding with Paper is that you can leave the tools visible and just draw on the upper portion of the canvas (more on that here). The results make a nicely-framed cinematic shot, without requiring any framing templates.
Badly Drawn Board using Paper on the iPad Air.
Recent updates to Paper make it easy to reorder, duplicate, and manage a sequence of storyboard drawings. And you can easily export them to the camera roll, where Dropbox can automatically find and import them.
Then, in After Effects, apply Boardo and choose the Paper preset. Boardo will frame up your shot with a bit of padding — and you can reframe and tweak from there.
These setup presets are one of the new features in Boardo 1.5. There’s one for Noteshelf, a couple for generic storyboards drawn or sourced from anywhere, and even one for boards drawn with Paper on iPad Pro.
This is where the cool part happens. Now you set up your animation by dialing in start and end values for Pan, Zoom, and even Dutch angle. If you like, choose a Camera Shake preset. The move automatically spans the length of the layer — or add Layer Markers to control where the move happens.
The result is a rich, lively animation that requires no keyframes, and automatically updates when you change the shot's length in your cut.
With Boardo, you get great results, fast. The above animatic took less than ten minutes to edit and tweak.
I've also added a cool new Shot Stats section that displays useful information about each shot. I built Boardo to help me pre-visualize 30-second commercials. Knowing the rough cut length of each boarded shot has saved my butt numerous times on set.
For a detailed tutorial, and to see what else is new in Prolost Boardo, check it out on the Prolost Store. Prolost Boardo 1.5 is a free update — if you're a Boardo 1.0 customer and you didn't receive a download link via email, request an update here.