What does your story board/outlining process look like?

[EncryptedWriting]

Hi! I am working with someone for a comic, and (as the writer and not an artist), I'm curious how y'alls storyboard looks like. What's your writing process? How do you start the sketching process? Which part takes the longest?

I want to make this process as easy as possible for my artist, and I figure I might ask!

Thank y'all!

[LordMaru]

For me, I have a writer I am partnered up with and he helps me write the story. We will typically write down a rough draft then I'm story board some comics ahead of time before going forward, Here's what our process looks like. He'll usually add some notes on the side

Episode 2 Story Board

[Kaydreamer]

I go straight from script to sketching a page layout. I find when I'm writing, the last thing I want to be thinking of is what line of dialogue goes in what panel. It kills my flow.

Deciding on a page layout is something which does take ages, but I'm going to try working vertically for a while to see if that helps. I'll deal with re-arranging it for print when I reach that stage.

If you're working with an artist, and you have a particular preference for what dialogue goes in which panel, it's helpful to have that in the script. If I were working with a writer, I'd expect that. (Unless they were comfortable allowing me the creative control to determine what goes where, and on what page.)

Here's a brief exerpt of the vert start of my comic script, when I was trying to format it properly. I use a program called Scrivner to write, which has a comic script format inbuilt. It's not free, but was well worth the money to me.

PAGE 1

PANEL 1
A ship is flying through space.

PANEL 2
A hand flicks a switch labelled ‘COMS’. There’s a glass of whiskey beside it.
SCRUFFY COURIER
This is the courier vessel 5UNFL0R, now leaving ________ space. ETA to the ______ facility, 20 Standard Hours. Pleasure doin’ business with ye.
RADIO
Affirmative. ETA conveyed. _______ out.

PANEL 3
A cigarette is lit.

PANEL 4
A pair of feet on a dashboard covered in switches, screens and lights.

[Colours_dont_match]

I use the app "MyStory" and there you have a bulletin board where you can write down different scenes and link for example characters and places to it too.
Usually I have a summary of a chapter and when you click on the note it shows the scenes that unfold there. Mostly I write the dialogue down there, sometimes I just have the idea of the scene, but not all of the whole dialogue.

Sometimes I have the dialogue, start sketching the scene and then realize that it's far too much or too less text to fit into the panel or somehow doesn't fit like I thought it would, so I still change dialogue stuff when I put it in the comic. Of course the meaning stays the same, but it can happen that I shorten stuff from two sentences to one, cause it just looks and feels better.

The longest is the colouring and outlining I guess.

[summermcallen]

Hi
I write my script like this (ignore the mistakes):

depending on the situation, I also make a possible camera angle + sun overview or an overview of where the characters are going

And then I draw the storyboard. sometimes more details sometimes less.

If your artist don't like drawing storyboards, you can draw it like stickmans or with a description what happens in it.that will definetly help, because so the artist must only think about how it has to be drawn and not what. artists just have poses/fces that suit them more and less, so if you limit it too much with the storyboad it could takes longer. but if you just show a structure, it definetly helps

here is a overview from storyboard to final (old piece, so ignore the bad drawing)

Which part takes the longest?
1. shading
2. sketching
3. base coloring
4. lineart
5. writing
6. storyboard

I really like drawing storyboard, so it's the fastest by me. I do a lot of storyboards for a film class back in school. after that I analysed a lot of films and drawn storyboards for older projects. so I'm pretty used to it. but I know a lot of artist don't like doing storyboards.

[andrew17]

Back in the olden times, when newspapers were still a thing, I wrote daily cartoon strip for the Daily Mirror, called 'Millie'. Formatting wasn't a worry, as the space I had was exactly the same long strip as all the others on the page. As I was writing a gag strip, I was more interested in making sure I got the feeling of each strip over to the artist, rather than telling him exactly where every character was to be positioned. I was lucky in having Roger Mahoney as the artist assigned to me, I knew that any script I turned in would be made twice as good by his artistry.

So the workflow would go like this. I'd first of all start by sketching rough ideas into a notebook. It would essentially a panel breakdown with dialogue - I knew what the pictures were going to be so there was no need to include all of them at this stage. I don't have any of the Millie sketches, but I do have my ones from my current comic, Smith, which will give you an idea of what they would look like.

(The lower one is yeterday's strip https://tapas.io/episode/2105721)

After being left for a few days to mature, I'd return to the notebook and produce a script. I'd been trained by a short lived comics college in London at that point run by a few DC and Marvel scripters. so my scripts reflected the over-wordy Alan Moore/Neil Gaimanesque fashions of the time - most of the other Mirror staffers would provide dialogue and that would be it. Three pages of script and a scrapbook of the results follow...

Nowadays I'm doing both the writing and the art so I miss out the script stage.