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Response to my previous post has been wonderful. Ben Zotto, the creator of Penultimate, blogged about it yesterday, and Daring Fireball picked it up as well, highlighting the bit about generalizing my specific need (storyboarding templates) into a general suggestion (user-customizable papers that are easy to share). “Good way to think about feature requests” comprised Gruber’s customary dense morsel of commentary.
Which commentary inspired Ben to craft a must-read post on how a good developer listens to customer feedback, and how a user can best make their case for new features. Hint: It’s not about feature requests.
I’ll give you an example from Penultimate. Early versions of the app had the eraser function, but the eraser was a fixed circular size (about the size of a fingertip). I got lots of feedback asking for selectable eraser sizes (small, medium, large). That was the feature request: “add other eraser sizes.” But more eraser options, as such, was not what these users were really asking for, which was usually a way to do detailed erasing in small areas. Instead of complying with the letter of the request, I like to think I did one better, which was to make the eraser size dynamic. There’s still just one eraser, but if you’re working in a detailed area, it’s tiny. If you make huge swipes, it’s large.
That’s the difference between an elegant app that just works and a Homer Car of faithfully implemented features reflecting no singular vision. Read Ben’s entire post here, and think about it the next time you get inspired to make a “feature request.” I know I will.
There’s an iPad stylus review buried in here. But first, some background on why I’m so excited to be storyboarding on a tablet.
As I detailed in The DV Rebel’s Guide, storyboards don’t have to be immaculately drawn to be effective. Which is lucky for me, because I have let wither whatever drawing ability I once had. To me, the boarding process is about flow. I need a tool that allows me to bang out my ideas as they come. For as long as I can remember, that’s been printed storyboard templates and a mechanical pencil. That’s how I whip up my “thumbnail boards,” which are usually stick figures, arrows, and incomprehensible squiggles.
This process is then followed by a rather ugly chore of scanning, cleaning up, and cropping in Photoshop.
To speed the process and avoid the manual labor, I’ve tried using various storyboarding systems and software, including ClipSketch and Storyboards on the iPad and SketchUp on my laptop, but I always come back to the simple, expressive basics of hand-drawn boards. They may be simple, but they’re my simple, and the camera angles I draw are never limited by what clip art I had on hand.
In the early days of the iPad, one of the first apps I bought was Penultimate by Cocoa Box Design. Penultimate was designed to be your digital Moleskine notebook, a simple and elegant blank page on which to doodle, sketch, or write. Whether it was the elegance of the app or the fluidity of the pseudo-pressure-sensitive drawing, Penultimate earned a permanent place on the front screen of my iPad.
I approached the developer, Ben Zotto, about my desire to use Penultimate for storyboarding. The app then offered a selection of three paper styles; plain, lined, and graph. Rather than myopically suggesting he add storyboarding templates, a rather niche use case, I suggested that it might be of general interest to his users to allow custom papers. I must not have been the only one thinking this, because just this May, Ben released Penultimate 3.0 with exactly that feature. He even used a film storyboard as his example.
Why is Penultimate, a simple, general-purpose notebook app, the best iPadstoryboarding tool? Turns out there’s a critical mass of features that add up to awesome:
Custom templates (papers)
Delete, re-order, and duplicate pages in a lovely thumbnail view
The best “feel” of any iPad drawing app (especially with a stylus, see below)
Just the right number of ink colors (almost, see below)
Easy PDF export of all or just some of your pages
The DV Rebel often repurposes tools from other disciplines. Penultimate is a great example of filmmaking software that isn’t just for filmmaking. I’m so fired up about my new storyboarding workflow that I’m sharing my Proloststoryboarding templates.
There are templates for HD aspect ratio and ‘scope, portrait and landscape. The landscape ones come in variations featuring a rule-of-thirds grid and a “blackout” look. Tap these links on your iPad and they’ll open in Penultimate.
You can change papers anytime as you’re working. So, for example, you could switch the thirds grid on and off as needed.
Most of the HD templates have a corresponding layout in the ‘scope aspect, so you can see how your shots will look framed for either format by switching papers.
You can choose whether the paper pattern is exported with the drawings or not.
You can choose which pages get exported when saving/sharing a PDF.
Landscape mode is not as slick as it should be when re-ordering pages or exporting. On the Mac, you can use Preview to rotate your pages to the correct orientation and re-save the PDF.
To make your own template, make a black-on-white PNG file at 718 by 865 pixels, and save it to your iPad’s Photo Library. You can then import it in the Papers popover menu.
Aside from better landscape support, what’s missing from Penultimate? Not much. The app allows single frames to be saved and shared as JPEGs, but only allows multi-page export as PDF. For my workflow, I’d occasionally like to export a series of JPEGs. I’d also like just one more pen color: a barely-there gray for roughing-in a drawing before refining it in black or dark gray.
The Boxwave Capacitive Stylus and the Wacom Bamboo Stylus for iPad
If you’re going to be drawing on your iPad, you’re going to want a stylus. I’ve owned three, the PogoSketch, the BoxWave, and Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus for iPad.
The Pogo Sketch is affordable enough to buy just to decide if you like using a stylus with your iPad. It’s also available at most Apple retail stores, although you’ll have to ask for it — it’s not on display.
The BoxWave is almost as affordable as the Pogo, but I found it to be much better. It’s small, as these things seem pathologically intent on being, and light. But the rubber tip gives a great drawing feel on the iPad screen, and it features a clever tether with a plastic plug at the end that fits in your tablet’s headphone jack, which improves your chances of actually having the dang thing with you when inspiration strikes.
Wacom makes the wonderful and not inexpensive tablets and Cintiq pen displays, so leave it to them to come out with a premium capacitive stylus. Their Bamboo Stylus for iPad is the most expensive one I considered. It’s got a nice heft, it’s long enough for grown-ups, and it has the finest tip I’ve seen on an iPad stylus — which may or may not mean anything tangible, but it just seems to feel better in use.
Expensive things are expensive. But to me, a $10 stylus that I never use is more expensive than a $30 that I love and use often. The Bamboo is by far my favorite and worth every penny it cost, and every day I waited for it to arrive.
What do you do with all these drawings once they’re done? You might consider dropping them into Storyboard Composer (UPDATE: Now available for iPad as Storyboard Composer HD) or build an interactive presentation of them in Keynote or the excellent Portfolio (all of which would be much easier with multi-page JPEG output). You might bring them into After Effects or your favorite NLE to cut them into an animatic. Our you might just work with them as a PDF or a printout. Whatever you do, I think you’ll find that drawing storyboards on your iPad is finally ready to replace paper and pencil.
Today Red Giant Software has released two new iOS apps that I helped design and create, Movie Looks and Noir. To celebrate the launch, Plastic Bullet is free on the iTunes app store for just two days.
Ever since we released Plastic Bullet, folks have been asking for some kind of “Magic Bullet Looks for the iPhone.” It probably surprises no one to learn that we’ve been working on just that for a while now. Pick a video, trim it down to just the part you want, choose from a variety of preset Looks, and then adjust those Looks to taste using Strength and Brightness controls.
Noir converts photos to black and white and allows you to re-light them using an editable vignette. It’s like a Colorista Power Mask for your phone. Noir is a universal app—buy it once and install it on both iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad.
Noir started as a little passion project for me. I wanted a way to prep my iPhone shots for use with Cinemek’s powerful Storyboard Composer app, but I was frustrated with iPhone image editing apps that forced me to tap my way through byzantine mazes of menus and ugly sliders to adjust my images. I wanted to quickly give my images a storytelling quality, with all the necessary controls on one screen. Then a funny thing happened—we distributed an early beta of Noir within Red Giant, and people flipped for it. The images they were making were gorgeous, and they were having crazy fun making them. In case it’s not obvious, that’s pretty much all I ever hope for the tools I create.
Movie Looks has been an equally fun challenge. Getting a tiny little phone to render HD video effects is no easy task, especially when you don’t want to compromise on image quality. We’ve built a completely new rendering engine and worked hard to make it as seamless as possible on the phone.
I’ve had my iPad for six days now, as anyone following me on Twitter knows. I realize that some of my Twitter followers find the iPad chatter to be a divergence from my usual filmmaking tweets seasoned with occasional missives about coffee and photography (both of which are, for me, filmmaking tools)—but that’s not the way I see it. My iPad has been quite busy over the first near-week of its life as a filmmaking tool.
First and foremost, I hoped that I would enjoy reading screenplays on my iPad, and I am happy to report that I do, very much. I read a ton of screenplays, many in PDF format. I hate reading them on my computer screen, especially my laptop. Not because of the backlit screen, but because of the psychological association I have with my computers. They are devices for doing work. They are a constant and cacophonous source of distraction. Reading screenplays, even well-written ones, is weirdly not easy. If you’re susceptible to distraction, reading a screenplay on a laptop can be like trying to count ceiling tiles at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
Printed screenplays are much better, but I hate wasting the paper myself. If they come to me printed, great—but even when printed double-sided (which welcomely is now the industry standard), they add up in meatspace. My 17” MacBook Pro, an extra battery, power adapter, and three screenplays crammed in a bag is a recipe for a very sore shoulder.
The minute the iPad apps started flooding the iTunes store, I began a search for a good PDF reading app. I flirted briefly with converting the screenplays to the ePub format used by Apple’s iBooks app, but with disastrous results. Here’s a cool article by someone more persistent that I—but while I certainly gave up in part due to laziness, it was also because I realized that ePub is not ideal for screenplays. ePub books can be re-flowed and re-paginated on the fly by the device, and that’s not a good thing for scripts, where white space, formating, and page numbers matter.
I didn’t just want to be able to read screenplays, I wanted to be able to make notes on them. There is a full-blown PDF annotation app called iAnnotate PDF, but I skipped it due to its complexity, and to be honest, because it is about the ugliest app I’ve seen yet on the iPad app store. I don’t need a ton of functionality, I just need to make little margin notes, like one can easily do in Apple’s under-appreciated Preview app on the OS X desktop.
Which sadly ruled out the simple, elegant, and bargain-priced (for now) GoodReader, which has a number of fans, including writer/director John August.
I found my sweet spot with ReaddleDocs. It is fairly priced at $4.99, and while not a standout in UI design (the icon is unfortunate, and the mechanics of organizing files are convoluted), it somehow has nailed exactly the amount of information I want on my screen when reading a script.
Some iPad periodicals have been criticized for failing to provide a sense of place within the larger document. Readdle is doing two things to subtly combat that here. Obviously the current page number and total page count are at the top of the document, but what I really love is the black dot on the right. When holding a printed screenplay, you always have an intuitive sense of how far through the document you are. The dot provides that perfectly. Wonderful.
Tap that dot and you can rapidly move to any page. The refresh rate is standard-issue iPad-awesome.
ReaddleDocs allows you to set as many bookmarks as you like, and name them. This is the capability that I have bastardized into a basic margin notes feature. Brevity is warranted, lest you type right off the edge of the screen (a forgivable bug for a day-one app). Another reason not to go too crazy with the bookmark/notes is that there is no way to export them.
The last thing I’ll say about Readdle is that, like GoodReader, it knows that the default iPhone OS PDF reading service is unsatisfactory, and replaces its scrolling model with a page-turning one. Here I have another minor complaint (which echoes August’s about GoodReader)—the page turning gesture in ReaddleDocs is too stubborn, and the redraw is not as slick as the rest of the app. Again, I forgive this as a version-one issue that would be hard to test for without an actual device in hand. I don’t expect (or want) fancy iBooks-like page flipping animation, just something simple and smooth (and left-to-right) like what’s in the excellent Amazon Kindle app.
Readdle and GoodReader can both grab your PDFs from the web, Dropbox, email accounts, and computers on a shared Wi-Fi network. There is a seemingly never-ending flow of classic screenplays available at mypdfscripts.com.
So that’s reading screenplays—how about writing them? Final Draft is working on something for the iPad, as are the developers of iPhone screenwriting apps Screenplay and ScriptWrite. Until those options materialize though, the clever duo of Joke and Biagio have created a template for Apple’s Pages app that achieves screenplay formatting via Styles, which allow some automation (hitting Return after a character name will take you to a dialog element automatically), but not much (no Tab to advance through elements).
Adobe has a cloud-based, colaborative screenwriting web app called Adobe Story, currently categorized as a “free preview version” at Adobe Labs. Who would have thought that Adobe would provide the Google Docs of screenplays? There’s even a standalone AIR app. If ever there was a screenwriting app that wanted to be on the iPad, its Adobe Story. And with Adobe running AIR apps on iPads on day one, maybe there’s hope.
If you plan on writing anything long on the iPad, you may want to consider a physical keyboard. I like the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard because it allows flexibility in how you position and orient the device, and because Bluetooth was named after a Viking.
There are several movies that provide endless sources of inspiration to me, and since I own them all on DVD, I have no compunctions at all about ripping them with Handbrake and storing them on the iPad. Sex them up with cover art from this search engine (in iTunes, File > Get Info, Artwork tab, Add).
I used Apple Compressor to make iPad-friendly version of my demo reel, my short films, and various other inspirational videos found around the web.
I’m using the new Publish functionality in Lightroom 3 Public Beta 2 to fill my iPad with portfolio images, along with color reference stills, reference images for projects in development, and the usual family photos. Since I don’t use iPhoto, I just tell iTunes to sync my iPad with a specific folder I’ve created. Sub-folders become iPad “albums.”
So I have a dozen screenplays, a half-dozen feature films (with commentary tracks), my entire photography portfolio, and the ability to watch anything Netflix streams, all tucked neatly in my new murse. Not bad for less then a week into things. I bought the iPad with specific (and, so far, not very adventurous) ideas about how it could instantly become a useful filmmaking tool, and so far it has met and exceeded my expectations.
Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:30AM 
