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This is the easiest step to skip, but we don't recommend it. We suggest you take the time to make a visual "play-by-play" of your story/production.  This will help you trouble shoot, ahead of time, with camera angles and troublesome set/scenes. Be sure to note in your storyboards what extra "stuff" you'll need to finalize your set/scene come production. We use Google SketchUp to pre-visualize and storyboard all sets/scenes.

Below is a sample of the storyboard used for the corporate production of a product tour animation for Holley, Inc. who manufactures carburetors for the performance automotive industry.

This storyboard shows some common uses of arrows to indicate camera and on-screen subject movements (images in left column) as well as how they correlate to the Dialog or narration (right column) of the script.

• Broad white arrows with black outlines signify camera moves or object rotations within the frame.
  
• Thin black arrows indicate individual part or subject movements within the cameras frame.
• The thin black rectangle with the broad arrow pointing to it signifies a zoom or dolly move.  

An additional column was added in the center to further describe what was intended to occur in the imagery. This additional "Camera & Animation" column was very helpful as the artist who created the final animation of this piece was remotely located in Germany while the producers were located in Los Angeles.

The final product came out almost exactly identical to the story board concepts imagery. The images were not hand drawn. A 3D model was imported into the free version of Google SketchUp and the director of the project (with no previous experience in SketchUp) was able to easily manipulate the model to show the angles that were desired in his mind. Each angle was exported as an image from SketchUp and copied and pasted into MS Word. 

You can download an editable MS Word document format of the .pdf above from this link:

At almost every step along the way of your business pracitices and production process you will need to consider, plan for and execute some type of data management. 

Any component you create in a digital format must be considered volatile and unsafe if it has not been duplicated, copied or backed up in at least two places. Three copies at all times is actually preferred. 

Consider all of your files and raw data. Everything from outlines, scripts and storyboards to images, video and audio that was captured into digital formats as well as any graphical elements along with the project files for their manipulation programs. 

We can never stress this enough: BACK-UP EVERYTHING DIGITAL IN TWO PLACES AT ALL TIMES

No hard drive is bulletproof. Never consider a single copy of a digital file to be safe from data loss.