Storyboards and timing

1What the Storyboard is for

The Storyboard is a per-scene filmstrip of your key drawings, your keyposes, laid left to right in timing order. In each gap between one pose and the next sits a little timing chart. It is the planning-and-timing layer that sits on top of your frame-by-frame timeline: draw the strong poses first, chart how the action travels between them, and the studio lays down the right number of empty in-between frames.

One thing to be clear about. This is hand-drawn animation, so the Storyboard never draws those in-betweens for you. It works out the timing (how many drawings, how they are spaced, how long each is held) and hands you blank cels at exactly the right moments. You fill them in.

2Where the Storyboard lives

Open an animation asset and its content splits into three top-level views, Storyboard, Animate and Publish, with a segmented pill to hop between them. Storyboard is your planning table: rough your keyposes and draw the timing charts that decide how many in-between cels there are and how they space out. Animate is the full frame-by-frame studio, where you actually draw and play each cel. Publish ships the finished piece.

The Storyboard shows one scene at a time, with a scene switcher, so you plan the timing scene by scene, the way a real animator blocks a shot before touching a single clean drawing.

The flow is simple: rough your poses and timing here, then cross to Animate and draw into the empty cels it laid down for you.

3Lay down your keyposes

Start with the drawings that tell the story. Your keyposes are the strong key positions of the action: the wind-up, the contact, the settle. Block those in first, in order, before you fret about anything in between. Press Add keyframe (its tooltip reads "Add a keyframe (a keypose) to this scene") and the studio makes a new blank key cel and drops a card for it on the Storyboard. Each card shows its role, Keyframe or Extreme, with a small KEY or EXT chip and the frame it sits on. A fresh card reads Double-click to draw this pose. So do that: open it in the drawing studio and draw the pose. Work through your keys in sequence and let the storytelling read at a glance.

4The timing chart between two poses

Select a keypose and the inspector shows Timing to next keypose, the classic spacing ladder governing the gap to the following pose. Drawing count sits along the top, one tick per in-between placed across the gap. You set three things. First, how many in-betweens with the In-betweens stepper (0 to 60). Second, the cadence: on ones, on twos or on threes, a fresh drawing every frame, every second, or every third. Third, the spacing curve (even, slow out, slow in, slow in-out, favor start, favor end, thirds, halves) that bunches the drawings so the move eases. Watch the readout: Drawings, Frames in gap, Duration at the scene's FPS, and Cadence. Apply it and those empty cels drop in, waiting for your pencil.

5Apply it: blank frames, drawn by you

When you apply your timing chart, the studio does the arithmetic: it works out how many in-between drawings you asked for, spaces them across the timeline, and slides the next keypose so the gap is exactly the right length. Then it drops that many blank cels at those frames and steps back. Nothing is traced or filled in for you. You draw each empty cel by hand, roughing on twos or ones as the move demands, using the light box to work off your neighbours.

The in-between count is a floor, not a ceiling. Need one more drawing to sell a snappy accent? Add it, and the chart widens to fit rather than tossing your work. Re-applying an unchanged chart is safe: it never wipes a cel that already holds art.

6Trace with the light box

Real animators work over a light table, and the light box is yours. When you draw an in-between cel, it shows the surrounding keypose roughs faintly underneath, so your new drawing lands on model and in the right place. Three settings let you dial the reference: off, half and full (its tooltip reads "Trace the storyboard rough over this cel"). Turn it up when you need a firm guide, down when the ghost is getting in your way.

Best of all, it is display only. The board roughs never become part of your art, so nothing underneath can ever leak into the finished cel, the reader, or the print.

7Keys, breakdowns, extremes and tweens

Every drawing wears a role label from the Frame panel: key, breakdown, extreme or tween. These are the old animator's words for what a drawing does. A key defines a pose. An extreme is the furthest point of a move, the moment stretched to its limit. A breakdown shapes the arc travelling between two keys. A tween fills the gap. One label carries real weight: only keys and extremes count as keyposes, so only they earn a Storyboard card and can hold a timing chart. Breakdown and tween are honest names for your own eyes and your team's. Nothing about the drawing gets spaced or held differently for wearing them.

8Adjust timing without the Storyboard

The Storyboard is a convenience, not a gate. You can retime an entire scene by hand on the Animate timeline and land in exactly the same place. Select a frame and the Frame panel opens (before that it just says Select a frame to edit it.). There you get Draw this frame, a Hold value from 1 to 12 (captioned on ones, on twos, or held longer), and the role buttons. The scene FPS field runs 1 to 60, defaulting to 24. So the whole craft, plainly: draw your cels, set each one's hold, pick your FPS, done. Bump a hold to let a pose linger or snap; change FPS to speed the entire scene.

9Posing reference: the mannequin

Some keyposes fight you: a hand thrown at the camera, a body twisting away, a foot foreshortened to almost nothing. When the angle won't sit right in your head, borrow a stand-in. Use Add a pose reference to drop a posed 3D mannequin onto the board or the drawing canvas. It lands as a static image with a small POSE chip, and a fresh one reads Double-click to pose. Do that to open the pose tool (Pose reference), swing the figure into your angle, and it re-renders as a reference image. Then you draw your keypose right over it, the way an old-timer props a wooden artist's mannequin on the desk and blocks the volumes before committing a line.

10Copy and paste on the Storyboard

The Storyboard is a board, so it carries its own in-board clipboard. Select the cards you want, press Ctrl or Cmd with C to copy, then V to paste them back, nudged slightly as fresh copies. It works on any card: keypose panels, pose references, stickies, shapes, arrows and images. Grouped items paste as a new group, and an arrow between two copied cards re-links to the copies (an arrow whose far end was left behind is simply dropped, so it never points back at the original). Use it the way a traditional animator reuses a hookup: clone a recurring pose, duplicate a beat to vary it, or copy a whole chunk of planning to riff on without touching the take you liked.

11Where motion is real

Everything so far has been hand-drawn cel work, where nothing moves until you draw it. But the studio has one genuinely different tool: a vector rig, a Stage whose bones you pose, with its motion laid out across Frames, Channels, Sequencer and Motion Graph. This one truly interpolates. It eases a bone's position, or a warp, smoothly between values over time, the way a jointed puppet swings an arm. That is a whole other discipline from spacing cels. If you are drawing frame by frame, ignore the rig entirely. If you are animating a puppet, that is precisely where the in-between motion lives, generated by the machine instead of your pencil. Two crafts, one studio, kept firmly apart.

12Two views of the same frames

The Storyboard and the Animate timeline are two windows onto one set of frames. A keypose you add on the Storyboard is a real cel on the timeline. The timing you chart writes real holds and spacing onto those same cels. So wander between them freely.

Two honest paths get you there. The Storyboard way: add your keyposes, chart the timing, apply it, then draw the blank cels it lays down, tracing your rough with the light box. The direct way: draw your cels straight on the timeline and set each hold and the FPS by hand. Same frames, same result. Pick whichever suits the shot in front of you.

Timing questions animators actually ask