We are excited to share some exciting news and express our gratitude for the delightful opportunity we had last month. KROCKIO in collaboration with the Hound Studio just had a special little debut giving a workshop to an international audience! Let us share some insights about our experience of participating in a filmmaking festival workshop program in cozy Avanca, Portugal.
The Aim of the Workshop
Antonio Valente kindly reached out to us with a request for a Workshop on Amanda Film Festival 2023 on KROCKIO’s storyboard generation feature complete with a storyboarding 101 from the Hound Studio.
The aim of the workshop was to educate the attendees on how to enhance their storyboarding pipeline with the use of AI technology, as the festival organizers were interested in employing the technology to streamline the creative process.
This was truly a one-of-a-kind experience and we are filled with gratitude to the festival organizers and the participants, who kindly lent us their attention for the 3 days of the festival.
In a 3-day workshop we:
- assisted our attendees in creating a storyboard for their very own stories. Starting from writing a ChatGPT-assisted script with Krock.io integrated script generation feature to creating their own storyboards for a 30-second long video and taking it all the way to creating an animatic, all within the scope of 2.5 days.
- taught our participants to generate, edit (redraw or create collages in photo editing software), and finalize storyboards with KROCKIO
- taught the basics of storyboarding, including camera shots, angles, composition types, and how to employ them as creative devices for an immersive story experience
- talked about pacing and dynamics in visual storytelling
- talked about how to employ composition for maximum clarity in visual storytelling
- talked about various types of shots based on different framing and camera angles and how to use them for better sequences
Is AI an ally or a threat to the industry?
It was a pleasure to see the attendees use the Krock.io platform and marvel at the scope of work they were able to create without prior experience in scriptwriting and storyboarding.
We wanted to drive the point across that AI is a tool to further humanity in its’ creative pursuit and not a nail in the coffin of creative labor and its’ commercial value – and somewhere deep within we also questioned the point we were arguing.
This workshop, as it gave us a chance to observe the creative process in action and how people engage with AI – provided a suitable answer. We got to observe our participants generate and test multiple versions of solutions to the task we gave them, to understand their expectations from the story, and to see them gain inspiration and improve on their ideas with the help of artificial intelligence. Which served to expand their creative potential, just like we hoped.
We know the possibilities and limitations of the tool very well but hadn’t had a chance to assess the skills of the audience beforehand – whether they were sufficient to redraw and combine the pictures generated with Dall-E to create an advanced storyboard or whether they had to solely rely on generated content.
We had 3 teams working on a project each, two of them with prior experience in storyboarding, some with more, some with less, and one team with barely any experience in filmmaking or animation altogether.
What a pleasure it was to see all 3 of them end up with an interesting story and a finished animatics they made on the third day!
Some of the Key Outtakes:
AI, combined with an understanding of the basics of storytelling and storyboard creation principles can offer great results even to those with minimal experience in this field. Even though they seem to be quite generic, the multiple versions you can generate in seconds are a powerful driver of creativity.
Our personal recipe for successfully employing AI is to use it as a starting platform from which you asses the generated content based on your own criteria for the story and the images, and work your way from fixing what seems unfit for your purposes to adding what is lacking until you are sure about the story and its visual representation.
We are very grateful for this opportunity to combine a chance to share our storyboarding expertise from The Hound Studio and present the innovative features we offer at KROCK.IO to streamline the storyboard creation process.
We want to express special gratitude for the platform we could use to also educate about Ukraine’s continuous struggle for preserving freedom and democracy and fighting against military aggression and the dictatorship regime of our notorious neighbors.
All the while standing tall, staying strong, positive, and creative, and gladly sharing our expertise with our European allies.
