- Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams
and in this video we're gonna be talking
through a very important part
of the pre-production process.
We're gonna be making style frames.
This is part two on our
motion design pre-production journey.
Part one dealt entirely with the moodboard,
where we created an abstract thematic collage
of things that inspire the final look of a piece.
Now in this video, we're gonna talk
about creating the actual frames
that will show what the final piece will actually look like.
(funky instrumental music)
This series is brought to you by Milanote.
Milanote is a wonderful new web app
that allows you to organize images, texts, and clippings
to get your creative ideas all put out there
and organized together in a cohesive way.
A lot of creative projects start very messy
and nebulous and Milanote can really help
to get things organized, get them structured,
and get you being more productive in your process.
So what is a style frame?
Well basically the style frame is meant
to convey what the finished look
of an animation is going to be.
Whether you're working with 3D, or 2D,
or some kind of compositing.
You really want to convey to a client
or the rest of the team, what does this actually look like
when it's gonna be done.
You have to do that before you start actually doing things,
or it can get very expensive.
Especially in a client situation,
where you need someone to be bought in
or to sign off on what you're actually doing.
You want to get everybody on board,
and a style frame is a great way to do that.
Style frames can be illustrations, they can be renders,
they can be something you actually create
in the app you're gonna use to do the animation.
Or they can be a little bit closer to concept drawings.
What's important is that they convey
the actual finished look of the thing,
before you have to start making it.
Often you'll present a few style frames
at a time to somebody.
If your piece has big narrative beats in it,
you probably want to show those large set pieces,
those key pivotal moments, and if this is
for a client piece you may want
to present several alternatives at once.
So in this video, we're gonna look at
how we choose what we're gonna represent in a style frame.
How we're gonna present that to clients.
And then what to do about feedback,
and refining that process.
So let's open up our project so far, and get into it.
Here are some images highlighting key moments
of the project we've working on
for this pre-production series.
But where do these come from?
The point of the series is to illustrate
that great motion design doesn't just spring fully formed,
and no step really springs fully formed out
of the the creators' minds either.
So as we said in the intro,
all of this started with a moodboard.
Well if you watched that video,
you'll know that even that started
with other smaller parts that coalesced.
We had to know why we're making this project.
Who we're making this project for?
And then we could create a mood board,
gathering together all of the things
that are gonna inspire this piece.
And now we're gonna take that visual information
that we collected here, we're gonna take that
and we're gonna use that to inform our style frames.
So things to take away, we've got bright colors.
I love simple geometry in here.
I like some of the motion that we see in these examples.
The representation of hands.
Tight framing, maybe some isometric angles.
These are the kinds of ideas,
that are gonna inspire the rest of the piece.
However, we can't just jump right
from one thing to the other.
We can't really highlight key moments
of a piece if we don't really know
what the narrative of that piece is.
What is actually going to be happening?
Now some pieces are more visually driven.
Others have a voiceover, and characters,
and dialogue, and scenes and all sorts of things.
There's quite a spectrum of what your piece
could actually be, and your specific process
may be a little bit different.
But after the moodboard, two things kind
of have to happen simultaneously almost.
We need a script of some kind
to tell us what is gonna happen in this piece.
And we need the style frame,
to tell us what it's gonna look like.
These two documents kind of have
to be generated and play off of each other.
You might get a rough outline
that then informs some key visual ideas
that in turn influences what kind of scenes your gonna do.
Alternatively, you could go through an entire script process
and then just pick little bits out of that.
It really depends if you're gonna be visuals first,
or if you're gonna be narrative first.
Personally I like to start
with a script and work form there.
So really quickly, here's the script
that was created for this project.
We're basically trying to show
a chess game and how interesting and dynamic it is.
Which I know is a hard sale for some people,
but I really enjoy the game.
So here's our kind of visual script.
I've organized it onto these cards
with a bunch of point form bits.
Let me just clean this up a little bit.
Now these columns are really just outlining sort
of the main kind of beats.
The main categories of things happening.
We're going to establish what's going on,
showing some kind of chess board.
Play is about to begin.
We're going to have the inciting action
of one player starting the clock and moving a piece.
We're gonna have a reaction to that,
where the other player sees the move,
maybe looks back and forth from the clock a little bit.
And then we move into that player's head space,
where they are gonna analyze the situation,
do some calculating of scenarios.
Play out some things in their mind,
and then finally take their move.
So from this very simple framework,
we can start to pick out what are some
of the areas that we should probably show in a style frame.
If we were making this for a client,
what do we need to show them in order
to convey the fullness of this piece?
So you might think, well we should get
the establishing shot in there.
Right, that's the first thing people
are gonna see when they look at the video.
That's a good place to start sometimes.
And you might think, well the final shot is important.
It's the last thing.
It might be the call to action in your piece.
So that could be an important part.
Where the action is gonna be the most intense
is also an area to think about.
So with all of these calculations this kind of montage.
I think we definitely need to pull something from there,
from the mind scape in this case.
And we're gonna need to convey visually
that we've entered into that space,
as opposed to the physical space where the two players are.
So that's something we need to show.
There are also two points in this piece,
where hands are gonna interact with chess pieces on a board.
We're definitely gonna wanna show hands,
pieces, this clock makes an appearance.
If you can get those things in the frame together,
that'll help inform a lot of the assets
we're gonna need to make later.
So I think those are the big things I want to do.
I want to show hands touching pieces.
Clearly important to the game of chess,
and this narrative in general.
I want to show transitioning from the physical space
into the mental space, and then I want
to show something in that mental space.
That should be enough to convey
the main beats of this piece.
So for those reasons, I have selected these.
This should convey, hopefully to the client enough
for them to understand when they read the script,
look at these, look at a storyboard,
they'll know what the finished product should look like.
And that's our goal.
So how do we actually go about creating style frames?
Well for this project I'm working in Adobe Illustrator.
That's where I usually make most of my style frames.
Typically when I start I like
to lay out a bunch of artboards.
You go file, new, and then when you're creating
a new thing you usually want to work
in at least the same frame dimensions.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the same size though.
That's really gonna depend on how you want
to lay these things out.
If you're making something in 4K,
you don't necessarily need to make style frames in 4K.
I think that seems like overkill.
We could even be working much smaller with this.
You can go ahead and knock out,
I don't know, maybe let's say nine artboards.
Then we just go ahead and hit create there.
You might be thinking well Evan
you only chose three kind of scenes to deal with.
Why are we making so many artboards?
Well it's because you usually want
to be able to present variations.
You want to present different color waves,
different levels of detail.
You want to show and explore
different ways of looking at this.
The purpose of the style frame
is to communicate where we're going visually,
but doing this step is where you decide
where we're gonna go visually.
So this means that you'll probably explore
and throw away a bunch of ideas that just don't fit.
And you'll present only your best stuff.
You might end up taking this in three totally unique ways,
and then showing the same scene in each one.
So that's what I've done here in this example,
where I'm mixing up colors and levels of detail.
I'm just goin' all over the place.
No scientific method here.
And we've got different ways
of showing the eyeball hard corners or totally soft.
Levels of detail on the hands,
we've got very abstract hands, very realistic hands.
You know what don't at me about my hand drawing.
Various levels of detail on the chess pieces.
And it conveys two different looks that are similar enough,
we're using the same colors same ideas
but we're representing them in different ways.
And this is what you want to explore with the style frames.
Now you might prefer to work in something like Photoshop.
Maybe your piece is gonna require a lot of brushwork.
Maybe it's gonna be a composite,
you're gonna be combining photos,
and vectors, and all sorts of things.
You want to just combine 'em together here in Photoshop.
You can definitely do that.
Again, you'd want to work with the same frame size.
Click this button here for artboards.
I really recommend making that happen.
You're gonna end up with this thing here
that says artboard one.
And now in here you can go layer, new, artboard.
Artboard two if you like, and boom you'll have
another artboard hangin' out in here
that you can draw inside of it's folders.
Keep everything nice and separated,
and I really recommend working
with multiple artboards at the same time
'cause it can really help you keep things in the same style.
Now because sitting around
and watching me draw things is not super exciting
and won't be very applicable to your particular project.
Once you have your images created,
how do we get them from here
and put them into a document that's gonna convince someone
to go along with our vision?
We would go ahead and we would just export,
export for screens, and you can select all these,
and it'll spit them all out as their artboard size.
And now we move into presenting them.
So what I like to do, create a new board,
style frames, Milanote generates SF for us which is great.
And now we would really just go to our hard drive here,
grab all of these artboard images
and blunk they all come out.
Then we just need to organize them a little bit.
Get organized.
I recommend making one of them kind of the focal piece.
So if this is gonna be the big one,
this is the big important one.
Look upon that, and then we just arrange the other ones
so they're a little bit symmetrical with each other.
Good, good, you an arrange them like that.
Milanote has a number of alignment
and distribution things you can use.
But you want to keep everything organized.
This way you can talk about it,
and your client can talk about it.
So for that reason I like to put a line out,
but this just helps us keep them all separated.
So we know this is Style One, this is Style Two.
You want to be very, very clear what's happening.
Now you might also want to drop in some notes.
So you might want to drop out some notes about this style.
Make that a heading, and we would
just describe some points about it.
So what are ways we can describe this.
We would call this you know simple, geometric, and abstract.
Those are kind of the things that describe this style.
Again, this comes back to making it conversational for you,
and someone who's reviewing it.
So they could say this is simple, but too simple.
It helps you just kind of define the language.
Now we can go in here with Style Two,
and we can say this is more organic or natural.
Or this is definitely literal shapes,
because these are literally the shapes of chess pieces.
This is literally the shape of a hand.
It's not really simple anymore,
it's more detailed and it has a bit more depth to it.
Whereas everything up here is flat.
So if you're going to be presenting your styles to someone,
you might need to go Style One, Style Two, Style Three.
And then when you share this you want them
to be able to comment kind of directly on the things.
One of the reasons I like Milanote
is that people can just drag out a comment.
They can say, eye shape isn't working,
and then you can reply back to that
and you can have a conversation about it.
So remember style frames are not only
how you communicate the visual direction of a project,
it's also how you discover
the visual direction of a project.
If this were a team situation, other members,
the creative director might be chiming in with things.
I might present Style One,
and then we derive Style Two from that.
Style One-B, or Style 1.1 on and on like that.
However, one caveat I'll say is that
if you are doing this work for a client,
please put in a provision that you will
not be doing infinite style frames.
And remember these are all billable hours also.
Hopefully, this will be useful in your design process.
It's something that really helps me out,
and helps me interface with clients and teams.
Gets everybody on the same page,
and makes for a much smoother project.
If you've enjoyed this part two of our pre-production series
and you haven't seen part one, check that out
and learn about moodboards.
And stick around for part three
where we talk about story boards,
which is comin' up after this.
The next step in our pre-production pipeline.
If you enjoy learning about this kind of thing,
please subscribe to the channel,
and a big thanks to our sponsor Milanote.
Who's web application you saw us using
to organize all of our style frames
to push those out to clients,
to share them with them team.
Milanote is a wonderful web app
for getting your pre-production process nice
and organized so that you can
actually get productive with it.
If you have questions about the pre-production process
in general or style frames specifically,
please let me know in the comments or send a Tweet at me.
I'm @ecabrams on there.
Thanks again for watching, and have a great day.