The Storyboard: Prepare an intro animation video

Published on February 9, 2016

Cinematography & Filmmaking

Intro Video, Pre-Production, Storyboard

“How did you make your intro video?”. This is a question we got from many of our viewers. But instead of just making an After Effects tutorial, we decided to teach you guys something more.
The production of an intro video or logo animation holds more than just a few clicks in After Effects. It starts with a good idea. And this idea needs to be writting down in a good structure.

There’re 3 branches which we need to fill in. The first one is the message. This is the story that we want to tell to the viewers. And this is the most important thing. When your message is strong you can start building onto that.
And that building starts in the second branch which is the look and feel. Here you’ll need to define the style of your animation. For us that’s the vintage or retro style. So we searched for such styles on Google and Pinterest for ideas.

Important here is that you define everything from colors, to styles and even the animations itself. All this information will be written down on paper in colums that are divided in intro, middle and finish. This is a good structure for an animation video.

And finally we can start drawing the storyboard. Here you’ll define all the elements that you need and draw arrows to where your animnation has to go to. This gives you a clear visual of all the things you need. And that is for the final step in the pre-production: gathering all the elements. You can create them yourself or buy your photos, videoclips or graphics from libraries like Shutterstock. And now we’re ready to take it all into After Effects.

This video is part of a tutorial series

• Make an intro animation video in After Effects (2/3)
• Lighting and music effects for an intro animation (3/3)