Today in our making manga series we are going to talk a little about creating a storyboard. This process has a few terms for it, including a “name.” I went to art school and took a storyboarding class and I write novels so I know how to write a story. When writing the dialogue and story information for the grydscaen graphic novel – volume 1, I initially did a storyboard for the first 6 chapters.
I started out just sketching. Mapping out the blocking for the story once I had the dialogue set. Most of the dialogue in the manga “A Storm’s Coming” came directly from the short story.
You want to be able to tell your story visually. A storyboard doesn’t need to be fancy. It will including the paneling and blocking for the story with some stick figures even and adding a little bit of dialogue. This storyboard can help you create the pages in the manga at a later date in more detail.
You want to get your ideas on the paper. It is easy to draw a storyboard template using rectangles or squares and lines below for dialogue or camera moves for a traditional storyboard feel. I had also animated using Flash some short animations about 5 minutes each and those storyboards were drawn with colour pencils and cut out and put on matte board.
When drawing your storyboards you don’t want to spend too much time on them. Just get your ideas down on paper quickly. The storyboards that were done for the grydscaen graphic novel – volume 1 were done on 8.5×11 paper relatively quickly.
The drawings above which ended up being very different in the graphic novel were the original character designs for Riuho (bottom panel left) and Lino (bottom panel right) when they were children in the scene in chapter 1 when they are playing in the garden at the palace. These initial drawings were eventually redone and used in the grydscaen web comic.
The storyboards allowed me to test out the way the layout was on the page. These drawings are closer to a “name” than a storyboard since they show panel blocking.
The other thing the storyboards did were to help me shorten the dialogue. A lot of the original dialogue from the novel grydscaen: beginnings was written for a novel length work and were too long for web comic panels. The dialogue had to be shortened so that it would fit into the comic pages. The changes in the dialogue were used in both the web comic and the graphic novel.
For the manga graphic noise which we are currently writing the accompanying novel, the storyboards that will be used for that will need to also include short dialogue to fit the pages when the manga starts getting drawn.
Your storyboard is the first view into your idea. From a writing standpoint you can also write episodic scene based lists if you don’t want to draw.
Storyboards are your friend. Use them to help you get a feel for how the initial look into your manga can be.