From storyboard to story: Animation content development

Abstract

Tsai-Yun Mou, Tay-Sheng Jeng and Chien-Hsu Chen

This research focused on a new method in the development of animation story content, which could shorten the creation process and arouse new ideas. Two phases of experiments were conducted to explore this reversed model. The first phase is a pretest of participants' creativity, which was a base for further examination the relationship between personal creativity and good story design. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was adopted and two divergent thinking tasks of TTCT - unusual uses task and picture construction task were executed. The second phase was an experiment by using a digital storyboarding system - Crazy Talk Animator to create a story without written script. The final storyboards were both self-evaluated and expert judged through questionnaire and interview to investigate whether this reversed model was practicable. The results showed that storyboarding as the method in creating animation content was workable. Personal creativity quotient did not have high correlation with story design performance. Participants regarded the storyboard driven method of content creation as helpful in visualizing and revising their creative ideas. Novices considered this method as easy while experts thought it as difficult for practice. In their design results, we found that a good story structure could still be created with storyboard driven method. Compared with the traditional process, the contributions of this model were more on the story climax, resolution, and plot. The findings of this study can assist in animation content training for novice designers