Exceptional stories begin with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 20

New features to support independent storytellers and studios

Toon Boom Animation today announced the release of the latest edition of our Emmy-winning software for creating storyboards and animatics, Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 20. With an increase in availability of content, filmmakers need to tell exceptional stories — and that begins in pre-production. The newest release of Storyboard Pro empowers artists and studios with workflow improvements, new tools for animating and timing animatics, in-program sound editing and improvements for exporting to the rest of your project's pipeline. Our all-in-one storyboard solution combines drawing, scripting, camera controls, animatic creation capabilities and sound tools, while seamlessly integrating with Toon Boom Harmony to go from planning to production.

"Filmmakers are seeing that pre-production cannot be neglected when it comes to meeting time and budget commitments, whether you are fulfilling increased demand for animated content or are planning a live-action production with less time for reshoots due to health and safety requirements," says Francois Lalonde, co-president of Toon Boom Animation. "Storyboard Pro 20 has tools for creators at every stage during pre-production to do the most with their storyboards, from drawing to refining their visual storytelling to experimenting with new drawing techniques to adjusting audio effects — all in one digital solution."

Trusted by major studios, artists, freelancers and students worldwide, Storyboard Pro is considered the industry standard for planning animated and live-action productions across television, films, commercials, video games and more. The software has been used to plan features from Klaus to next year's highly anticipated Bob's Burgers: The Movie, to television series Stranger Things, Central Park and The Walking Dead.

Storyboard Pro 20: The freedom to create, the power to control

Storyboard 20 brings new features to storyboard artists and animatic editors. Storyboard artists will find helpful new tools to support their work, including new drawing grids, an all-new onion skin display mode and an option to automatically fill closed shapes with the Brush Tool. Meanwhile, animatic editors will now be able to refine the easing on camera and layer motion using bezier curves, and take advantage of Blackmagic Design playback devices to ensure that they are seeing the most accurate timing possible. Storyboard Pro 20 also includes new audio editing tools for adjusting recorded sound and dialog inside your project.

To produce the new launch animatic for Storyboard Pro 20, Toon Boom Animation partnered with Exceptional Minds, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit vocational academy and animation studio that provides customized instruction as well as hands-on experience to artists on the autism spectrum. Toon Boom Animation commissioned the team of artists at Exceptional Minds to produce original scripts, storyboards and animatics inspired by the theme of space, while providing access to online instructor-led Training Courses and mentorship from seasoned storyboard artist Karine Charlebois.

"I enjoyed learning Storyboard Pro. It came as a surprise because in the past I hated storyboarding, but it was because I didn't have the right tools," says Jacob Lenard, artist at Exceptional Minds and an assistant director on Storyboard Pro 20's launch video. "One thing I liked about learning the program was all the different drawing tools, especially the brushes. There's a large variety of different brushes to work and play with; I used them to make rough design sketches for the demo pack. I also like the timeline editor. It is easy to time out an animatic and add sound."

Storyboard Pro 20 New Features

• Advanced drawing tools
  Get creative with new drawing grids, pencil line textures, a new onion skin display mode, review blurs before they are applied to drawings, auto-fill closed shapes with the brush tool and more
• Improved animatics editing
  Edit drawings on video tracks, create clips with multiple drawing layers and drag panels onto video tracks, refine camera and layer motions using bezier curves
• In-application audio editing
  Discover audio tools and effects including the ability to speed up and slow down audio clips, apply pitch shift, echo, reverb effects as well as high-pass and low-pass audio filters to reduce unwanted noise
• Export improvements and pipeline integration
  Find a wide range of export improvements, including support for exporting video with transparency, setting colour spaces and PDF export with unicode fonts

Visit the Storyboard Pro product page for an in-depth review of all the new features and product enhancements.

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About Toon Boom Animation Inc

Toon Boom Animation Inc.'s award-winning software is the global standard for animation, storyboarding and pipeline management. Storyboard Pro and Harmony solutions provide everyone from enthusiasts to professionals with the artistic freedom to create in any style and efficiently publish anywhere, while Producer provides real-time management for animated projects. Customers who chose Toon Boom animation software for the development and creation of their productions include Disney Television Animation, Amazon, Fox Television Animation, Nelvana, Toei Animation, The SPA Studios, Xilam and Boulder Media, to name a few. The technology is currently available in English, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. For more information, visit: toonboom.com.

For more information (press only):

Philip Mak
Senior Content Writer
Toon Boom Animation
pmak@toonboom.com