Storyboarding in clay

01Why we block before we paint

Episode 1 of our fan remake adapts chapters 86 and 87 of Yusuke Murata's manga. In our first motion cut of the Fubuki scene, every frame was drawn on its own. People changed clothes from one cut to the next, sat in different places, and at 0:33 the camera jumped across the room.

None of those frames is bad on its own. The trouble is that nothing ties them together. Each one is invented fresh from a description and a reference picture, so each one invents its own room. Animation layout and film previs solved this long ago: build the place once, put everyone on a mark, choose every camera, and only then draw. This post follows that method through two scenes and 19 cuts: the Fubuki scene (pages 160–164) and the arena where the mercenaries turn (pages 190–193).

02The process, one cut at a time

Each cut goes through eight steps. To keep it concrete, we follow one cut, 124, all the way through. In it Fubuki looks down at Genos, who kneels over his opened arm on spread newspapers and looks up at her (page 163, panel 4).

1. 1The cut list
2. 2The place, in metres
3. 3The cast
4. 4The blocking
5. 5The cameras
6. 6The checks
7. 7The plates
8. 8The paint

1The cut list

Each cut starts from our storyboard: the page and panel it adapts, what happens in it, and how long it runs. These are the 19 cuts in this test.

2The place, in metres

Each set is built once from the manga's establishing panel, out of boxes, wall panels with holes for doors and windows, rings and tiers.

• The apartment is 3.6 by 4.5 metres. The balcony door and the low sun are at one end, and the kitchen doorway is at the other. The TV wall, shelves, closet and a bookshelf corner sit between them.
• The arena is a pit of sand 56 metres across inside tiers of balconies packed with monsters. It has a gate on one side, Gyoro-Gyoro's ledge on another, and a seated colossus whose claws rest on the sand.

Everyone gets a mark and a facing. Below, everyone is seen from above, with the camera of cut 124 drawn as a wedge.

3The cast

Each character gets one model sheet in the outfit they wear in that scene, drawn in the film's look. Every painted frame of the scene is given the same sheets, which is what stops costumes from changing between cuts. In the blocking, each character is a jointed mannequin painted in their costume colours, so the painter can tell who is who.

4The blocking and the master

With everyone on their marks, we paint one master frame of each scene, the whole place at the moment it starts. Every other frame of the scene takes its look, palette and light from it.

5The cameras

Each camera is written the way a storyboard artist would say it, and a small solver turns that into a position, an aim and a lens. Cut 124 was written as "medium, over Fubuki's shoulder, on Genos's head, from 0.7 m back, 32 mm". Blender renders a cut in about three seconds, at no cost.

6The checks

Because the blocking is real 3D, we know where every head lands in every frame, and how far everyone is from the camera. So the rules of composition can be checked before anything is painted.

The first eight rules come from our composition study, which drew on cinematography, anime layout and the Madhouse first season. On the first staging they caught two real line crossings, from 123 to 124 and from 71 to 72, before any money was spent. The last three were added after this test, for reasons section 06 explains.

7The plates

Painting from the clay alone gave rooms that were too bare: grey boxes came back as cardboard, and blank walls stayed blank. So each set is also painted empty, once, from a handful of cameras. These are the plates. Each cut is then painted with the plate whose camera is closest to its own.

8The paint

GPT Image 2.5's edit mode repaints the blocking as a finished anime frame. For cut 124 it is given five pictures: the blocking, the nearest plate, the master, and the two model sheets of the people in the shot. It is also given a description read off the blocking. That description says, left to right, who is near or far, which way each person faces, their pose, the camera angle, and the side the light comes from.

03Four ways to paint a cut

Every method gets the same model sheets and the same master. They differ only in the first images.

04Every cut, every method

The full board. Each row is one cut. The first five columns come from the first staging: its blocking, method A on the first cameras we wrote, method A on the cameras revised after the composition study, the hybrid, and the chained frame. The last column is the hybrid repainted from the second staging (section 08). Click any frame to see it large, and use the arrow keys to step through a row.

05What held: continuity

• The room. With the plates, the apartment is the same room in every cut: the TV wall, the shelves, the balcony light, the kitchen door. Painted from the clay alone, the room is a plain wall and a cardboard box.
• The costumes. Every frame of a scene gets the same sheets and master. Nobody changes clothes, and Silverfang is shirtless in every cut.
• The placement. The hybrid keeps everyone where the blocking put them. In cut 123 it keeps all five people, where painting from the clay alone keeps two.
• The line. The checks caught two crossings before any money was spent.
• The price. Kie sells the same edit at a flat $0.05 for a 2K frame. On fal at its highest quality, the same frame cost $0.10–0.14. We can't tell them apart. Cut 74 was painted both ways on the same camera after a Kie timeout, so you can compare them yourself on the board.

06What didn't: composition

Then we looked at the hybrid frames next to the chained ones, cut by cut. Chaining is less accurate on continuity, but almost every chained frame is the better picture. In the hybrid, the staging is poor, and so is where the people are placed in the shot. Here is cut 76, where the mercenaries' armour cracks as they convulse:

The painter follows the blocking so closely that the blocking's composition becomes the frame's composition. So the blocking has to be the better shot.

We went through every pair and found five things the chained frames do that our staging didn't.

1. Look down the room. The chained frames point the camera along the apartment toward the balcony, so the low sun is behind the people and the room runs on behind them. Ours mostly faced the side walls. In cut 127 the wall behind Bomb was only 1.15 times as far from the camera as he was, so he was pinned to it.
2. Keep the others in the frame. In cuts 126, 127 and 128 our camera saw one person and nobody else. The chained frames show the family in every one: Bomb behind Silverfang, the whole room behind Fubuki. The scene is about Fubuki walking in on a room full of heroes. A single shot against a wall loses that.
3. Build the frame in layers. A near shape at the edge of the frame, such as a shoulder or a head of hair, then the subject, then the room.
4. Wider lenses, closer in. Our closer cuts used 40–60 mm lenses from further back, which flattens the room into a backdrop. The chained frames read like 24–35 mm lenses used close in.
5. Place people for the shot. The chained 124 puts Genos between Fubuki and the family, with the balcony behind him. Our marks put him at the kitchen end. From there, any camera that keeps him on his side of the line looks straight at the closet.

We then measured the first staging the same way for every cut: how many other people are in the frame, how far the room runs behind the subject compared with how far the subject is, and how far the subject's face turns from the camera. The numbers say what the eye says. The table is in section 08, beside the second staging.

07What didn't: which way a mannequin faces

The second weakness is smaller, but it kept coming up. The painter often couldn't tell which way a mannequin was facing. In four of the nineteen hybrid cuts (70, 75, 77 and 126), it turned someone the wrong way or restaged them, even though the prompt also said it in words, such as "in profile, facing screen right". Painting from the clay alone made the same mistakes.

A mannequin's face was two dots and a small nose on a ball. From behind, in profile, or on an all-black costume there was almost nothing to read, so the painter fell back on faces turned toward the camera. The mannequins now have faces: eye whites with pupils, brows, a mouth, a bold nose, and ears. The ears are what tells a profile from the back of a head.

08The fix: compose first, lock second

The chained frames have the composition and the blocking has the continuity, so we take the composition from the first and lock it into the second.

1. Mark the layout. On the chained frame, or on Murata's panel, we mark where each head sits. We add a second point on the main bodies, the chest or the hips, so the size is pinned. We also mark landmarks such as the balcony window.
2. Solve the camera. A solver searches the set for the camera position, aim and lens that put our real marks on those points. The camera must stand in open space, outside everyone, and within the zone we give it. That zone matters: with no limits, the solver happily shoots from 26 metres away on a long lens, which matches the head positions but flattens all the depth.
3. Check it. All the rules above run on the result, including the three new ones.
4. Paint it with the hybrid. The room, the costumes and the line stay consistent, as they were.

Each sheet below shows the chained frame with its layout marked in red. Beside it is the solved blocking, with our marks landing in green.

The chained frame isn't always right. Where it did something our real geography can't do, we kept the rule and dropped the picture:

• 68. The chained frame has Super S at the far left and the huddle at the Ripper's right. On our marks, no camera behind the Ripper can do that: the huddle always lands on the same side as she does. 68 keeps its first camera.
• 72. The chained frame puts Gyoro-Gyoro on the left of the frame, which crosses the line from cut 71, where she is on the Ripper's right. 72 is solved as the mirror image, with her looming in the right foreground. Its red marks are mirrored too, so they don't sit on the chained frame's heads.
• 123. The chained frame moves Genos to the wrong side of Fubuki, so his position is left free.
• 74. The spin starts with Super S's back to us, because the huddle she lashes has to be in the frame behind her. The cut is declared as one that shows her back, and its last frame turns her round.

Two placements changed on purpose:

• Genos moves 0.9 m into the room, between Fubuki and the family, in every cut of the scene. Continuity is untouched, and his over-the-shoulder now looks down the room to the balcony.
• In 128, Fubuki turns away from the room as she sobers. The people she came to recruit are behind her, as in the chained frame.

The same measures on both stagings, for every cut we re-staged:

Each cell shows the first staging, then the second. Others counts the other people in frame. Room ÷ subject compares how far a level ray runs before it meets a wall with how far the subject is from the camera; under 1.8 means the subject is against a wall (in the arena the walls are far away, so it is not measured). Face is how far the subject's face turns from the camera; past 95° we see the back of the head, which 123 and 74 declare on purpose.

09The result, painted

We repainted all 19 cuts with the hybrid from the second staging, plus the apartment's master, because Genos had moved. This is the test of the whole idea: does the hybrid now get the chained frame's composition and keep its own continuity? In the cuts that matter most, it does.

Three more things the repaint showed:

• The faces work. In 75 the mercenary now looks down to the left, the way his blocking faces. Twice before, he had been painted looking the other way.
• The Ripper keeps his bandages. With the corrected sheet, no frame in the repaint gives him a mouth.
• Don't trade the story for a rule. Our first paint of 128 lost the whole family. To keep two heads off the frame edges, we had tightened the lens to 50 mm. That pushed the family into the corners, and the painter dropped them. The fix was to stand the camera back in the kitchen doorway on a 40 mm lens, so everyone sits well inside the frame.

10Every re-staged cut

For each cut we re-staged: the chained frame it took its composition from, the first staging and its hybrid frame, and the second staging and the hybrid painted from it.

11What it cost, and what's next

The remake is a project on the workspace: One-Punch Man, season 3, remade. It is on show for now. Anyone can look around; joining and working on it open later.