What are Fully Designed Style Frames?

Part of AnchorFlow - Anchor Animation’s unique production process - is that our storyboards are always fully designed style frames.

But what exactly does this mean?

Sometimes, it can be useful to produce hand-sketched storyboards that allow you to plan shots, layout, and story flow.

The problem we found is that, while useful internally, these simply don’t give our clients enough to go on to provide feedback.

Part of our job to make the production process easy for you to feed back on.

We know it’s difficult to get internal teams to sign off on outsourced work. Adding an extra step in the production process makes this even more difficult for you.

Conversely, providing clients with a “what you see is what you get” storyboard smoothes this process. Significantly.

You get detailed, polished, colour-accurate frames that truly reflect the final look.

Left: Freeze frame from final video. Right: Storyboard, signed off by client.

This allows our clients to feedback on story flow, shot choice and design. The colour choices and overall style can all be fed back on.

The temptation, of course, is to assume hand-sketched storyboards take less time, so “let’s do them to save money”.

But you need to design every shot anyway, so it isn’t “hand sketch or fully rendered” it’s “both, or one”.

“Shall we also do a hand-sketched storyboard as well” isn’t a bad question, but it’s a subtly different one to the cost-cutting initive some clients assume.

In our experience, unless you’re planning a live action shoot, or something incredibly complex technically, it’s much better to give clients a proper storyboard, allowing feedback on story-flow and design, in one go.