Free storyboard software

It occurred to me that Pikkipi could be used as a storyboarding tool – I mean storyboarding as in planning out shots for a movie.  It might be a good option for students and the like who would ideally would want industry software such as FrameForge but don’t have the money to put down and would like a free storyboarding software. 

Here’s a storyboard frame that I knocked up really quickly using Pikkipi.  I added the notes using Keynote, a presentation program on the Mac.  You could probably use all kinds of software to add arrows and annotations, or even the presentation maker in Google Docs.

make a storyboard with Pikkipi here

Getting the character into position

There’s two ways to position the characters in the scene now.  This should make it easy to set up the scene faster without a lot of mouse-dragging, or just to zoom in on the head when you are working on an expression or new face setup.  Here’s the two ways you can move characters around:

 

1. Use the Quick Move buttons.  Clicking one of these will pull the character into a predefined position.  You can also use these buttons if you lose the character off the side of the scene!
    
2. Move with the mouse.  When you click on the scene and drag (hold the mouse button down and move the mouse) you will move the character in the scene.  By default this is a back-forth-left-right movement but if you click a different Mouse Mode icon at the top, you can change the movement to rotating the character or raising/lowering the character. 

You’ll probably find the Quick Move positions good for setting up the character positions quickly, then use the mouse move options to fine tune their place and rotation.

>> Go to Pikkipi now

Sharing scenes

When you’ve made a scene the next step is to save it to your hard drive via the clipboard.  On the Finish tab the ‘Copy to Clipboard’ button will do exactly that.  

After this, the scene is on the clipboard of your computer and you can do whatever you want with it.  To simply save the scene as a file on your computer’s hard drive, open an image editor.  

If you are using a Mac you can use the Preview program. Start Preview, open the File menu and choose ‘New from Clipboard’.

On Windows you can use Paint.  Open the Paint program, then press Ctrl + V to paste the scene image, or open the Edit menu and choose ‘Paste’.

Now in either program you can Save the image (from the File menu) on your hard drive. 

Once it’s on your hard drive you can do all sorts of stuff… here’s some ideas based on what you’ll find on the web:

• Share it on Flickr – remember to tag it with the word Pikkipi
• Add effects and paint on the scene with an image editor like Picnik
• Add comic effects with FunPix or a program like Comic Life
• Create a Visual Novel (someone tell me if you try this!) 
• Animate it with a soundtrack using something like Slide