 Wow, I get applause. So hopefully this will work. So there's a very common question that I hear a lot when it comes to Blender, and that is, can you do X in Blender? And my response has evolved to, you can, but why? Because usually what they want is something very, very specific. Take storyboarding, for example. Can you do it? Well, let's have a look. Can you storyboard in Blender? Well, first we have to ask ourselves, what is a storyboard? And I like to define it as a sequential art that visually conveys the impact of a written scene. You take a script and you break that down into shots and frames and scenes and so on, as you can see here. So a project that I was working on last year was a short film entitled Each Sheep for CG Cookie. Here's this. Let's do the next one. And it essentially breaks down a scene, will break down into shots and shots break down into frames. As soon as you break continuity, that is a new shot and a sequence of shots make up the overall scene. And so if we take a look at that script up there, there's just a portion of this. We've got some rabbits, apparently they're frolicking, but I just had them eating in grass and then they look up. And then this monster, Melvin, jumps out from the bushes and scares the, I don't think there's a bleep button, so I can't say, out of them. But what you storyboard in is not really important. I mean, for decades, people have been storyboarding on paper and it's basically how you tell the story, how you visualize what's on the script to give to a department that is going to put that on a screen. And so here's some examples. I mean, Disney, I forgot what that one was. I think it was Alien, yes, and Star Wars. All this stuff was just done with markers on paper, right? There's no software involved. And one of my favorite stories is the art of June. Has anyone seen Yodurowski's June? Not the actual documentary? Yeah. Jean Girard Mobius, who passed away a few years ago, he illustrated the entire storyboard and I believe this could be apocryphal. There's only two copies of that in existence. So, hey, look, my birthday's coming up next year. If anyone wants to pitch it. But he scribbled really, really quickly and he storyboarded the entire film just like that, just pencil and paper. But of course, in today's modern age, we're used to seeing storyboarding software and there's a ton of packages, but they're generally designed to do one task and that is storyboarding. And, you know, one of the most popular ones happens to be Storyboard Pro by Toon Boom, but it will set you back about that much on a yearly subscription. So the question remains, can you storyboard in Blender? Well, first, we have to ask ourselves some questions about the software. What task is it that you need your software to accomplish and are the tools available in something like Blender an efficient option? I mean, yes, we can say that Blender's got things like certain tools that we know work. And so when I'm storyboarding, I know I need to sketch out some ideas very, very quickly and we have the grease pencil for that. We need to be able to organize the scenes and the shots and the frames. And for that, we can on a timeline, set out markers and bind cameras to markers so we can get automatic camera switching. More often than not, it's the lines are blown between storyboarding and animatics. Everyone is now expecting some sort of an animatic to come out of the process. Right. And for that, we have the VSE in which we can edit. So Blender does have the tools. But how do you actually storyboard in Blender? So I'm going to show you three ways that it can be done. So this is one shot and you can see here that grease pencil that these are several grease pencil objects on the left here. I've got a sky layer. I've got a background. I've got a character, got some foreground, and I've got a camera that is animatable. Now, the way grease pencil is set up, it's in very in real world units. Right. So that's why it's a really good animation tool. The camera, you can do depth of field effects. You can move around the scene as you would in, you know, human size scale. And so drawing in grease pencil, you can get all of that drafted before you replace that with 3D objects or your characters or whatnot. And of course, that's what it looks like through the camera. All of those things are composed in a shot. Now, hopefully this will work. Let's see. Do I have to press the button again? Let's see now. No. OK, let's go back. I don't think this is going to play, but it shows you the breakdown, right? So this is what we're seeing through the camera. And I don't actually have to resort to interpretive dance, thank goodness. But you can imagine that this camera can be animated to get the effect of what you have to see. So unfortunately, that will not play the video. Now, what this slide is showing is that in blender, just vanilla, no add-ons, no nothing, we can set up cameras wherever we want and we can point them at a grease pencil object and we can camera switch so that when the animation of one grease pencil object is finished, it moves on to the next camera. That shot is rendered and so on. Now, if this would play, it would show you so unfortunately it won't. Up the top, you can see where the shots are marked. Those are markers on a timeline and we've got shot one, shot two, shot three. Now, this is shot one, obviously. And as that animates, then it switches to shot two and then it switches to shot three as the timeline progresses, which it's not going to play for us. But you can go beyond that even in blender as it stands. One thing you can do is add effects and modifiers. So let's, for example, say we want to do a depth of field effect where the camera is pulling back and you want to get a sort of a blurry effect as you can sort of see in the top there. Well, you can add a couple of modifiers like the blur modifier and because you can just tick a box saying depth of field, if you've got the depth of field set up on your camera with a really nice short focal length, I believe the word is, could be wrong, you can animate that. So as you pull the camera back, you can change where the focal plane is so you can pull focus from the wrangler there with that horrible looking weapon and the monster in the foreground. But then what happens is you have to render everything out. And if you want to use the VSE, you have to bring those slides in, throw them on the VSE and edit them like this, OK, which I think we've all done before. So if this could play, you could see all the files and they're dragged on here. And then as you play the animation, you can edit the timing of them. Now, that's how you could just do it in Blender right now. There are a couple of. Well, there's one add on that I used extensively and it's called Storyboard by Ed White. You can download this for free. And the way it works is it basically automates everything that I just said. It will set up cameras for you. It will set up a grease pencil plane in front of every camera and a background plate. And you can dynamically add cameras as you need them. And the way I worked is that each camera would hold a shot and then I could animate a number of frames within that shot before the marker would go on to the next camera and so on. But you still got the same problem that once you render everything out, you've got to put them on a timeline like this. Now, the storyboard add on works really, really simply. Now, I'll see if this. Yes, OK, I'm just going to bring this up because it's all color coded for you. This is what it looks like. It from the get go, you will get a generated grease pencil object with some layers already made and it works. Usually you break it down. There's background, this character, right? So you've got a rough, got a clean and you've got that for both background and character and you've got some materials that you can set up and you can customize some, add some extra ones so that every grease pencil object that it's generated for a shot has is already set up like this. And it's it's really, really handy. And when you when you finally generate it, you know, you can tell it how many shots to have first. And it does this and you can sort of see down the side there. All the shots are all cameras that are automatically lined up and bound to markers along a timeline. It's very, very useful. Now, this is really good if you're going to just draw 2D drawings. OK, but of course, we sometimes want to go beyond that. And that's where I had a bit of a play around with the story pencil plug-in that is currently in 3.4 Alpha. And I had a talk to Daniel Matinez-Larab earlier, who showed me a couple of things. And like, unfortunately, the video won't play. But what this does is it takes a different approach. You download 3.4, you go to your testing, you activate the plug-in, as you do. And then you want to set up a storyboard sequence from the get-go, right? So you open up, say, like a 2D animation preset. It'll be automatically in draw mode, and that's where this menu item is. And just to see how it works, I actually took all the assets from the previous storyboard that you saw and brought them into a fresh 3.4 Alpha project, scene by scene, so that I could build it up and see if I could work it. And what we're seeing here is on the... My left, your right. It's confusing. Is a timeline where I've put each of these shots, right? Each strip is a scene. And we all know how scenes operate. The way this plug-in operates is that it can switch between VSE and the 2D animation workspace. Each shot can carry whatever assets you need, and not just grease pencil ones. So once you're done with, say, a shot like this and you want to bring in 3D objects, you've already done the edit for the animatic. You just swap them out. You get your asset browser, your drag and drop in your assets. That shot is automatically updated on the VSE, right? It's a very efficient way of working, which the 2D version is not so good at handling because it won't see 3D objects just restricted to that one shot. Whereas this, because it's a separate scene, everything in that scene is contained that way. Now, funnily enough, I did this all on the plane, on the way over here. And even though it was a 21-hour flight, it didn't take me 21 hours to do. It was actually a very pleasant, easy experience to do on a crappy MacBook Pro that was running out of battery, so I didn't have a lot of time. And if I could play it, I would. That's what it's looking like. And so the answer to that question, can you do X, and in this case, X is storyboarding in Blender, it turns from, well, you can, but why? To, hmm, how would you do that? To, finally, the answer is yes, yes, you can. So look, that's my presentation without some animations, unfortunately. My name's Paul, I'm with this CG Cookie. We've got to stand up in the market, and if you have any questions about it, I do have these demo files, you can come up to me and I'll show you on my little laptop, and I can actually play through them for you. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you.