Working with previsualization elements

Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin has been attributed to saying “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” This is true of any project. It’s best to do some sort of thumbnailing of what you’ll be building. In the case of creating games or even cutscenes, planning is essential. Thankfully something called previsualization, or ‘previz’ as it’s called in the entertainment biz.

Previsualization is the visualizing of complex scenes in a movie before filming. It’s comprised of tools like photography, storyboards, animatics, shotlists, and even storyboard software. Unity in itself is becoming a previsualization tool in itself now with its powerful and easy-to-use tools!

In the case of our current Sleeping guard scene, we’re given a storyboard with instructions on what the director would like to see during the cutscene.

By creating quick and dirty thumbnails of a scene, a director can experiment to find out just the look they want for a scene before investing time, effort, and most importantly finances that would normally be wasted after hours have been spent on a scene only for it to be looked at and then hear “No, I don’t like that, let’s do it differently”. While changes in direction are constant and things do change all the time during production, previs helps avoid a lot of wasted effort and it’s wise to measure twice before cutting once.