One Promo, Two Aspect Ratios, Twenty-Six Hours
You are a freelance storyboard artist in Ludhiana working from home on a 4-year-old i5 laptop with 8 GB RAM, a Wacom Intuos and Photoshop. A school in Jalandhar commissions a 60-second animated admissions promo: 22 panels with dialogue, camera notes and timing. On day one the marketing head adds a requirement - the same promo will run as a 9:16 Instagram Reel and a 16:9 YouTube pre-roll, 'so just make it work for both.' The animator sits in Chennai on a 4 Mbps connection and has asked for files under 20 MB per panel set. The studio's email says 'final boards by Friday 6 pm'. You have drawn 18 of the 22 panels from a rough synopsis. On Thursday at 4 pm the final script arrives with a new opening and a new ending, and the synopsis you were boarding from is gone.
1. How do you set up the canvas and workflow to serve both 9:16 and 16:9 without drawing 44 panels?
Read the worked answer
Draw once at 16:9 with a locked vertical safe area, and only re-compose where it genuinely matters.
Master canvas: 1280 x 720. At this stage of a board, HD is plenty and it will actually open on 8 GB of RAM. If the school needs a printed deck, go to 1920 x 1080 for the export only.
On a top locked layer, place a centred portrait window of 405 x 720 pixels - that is exactly 9:16 inside the 1280-wide canvas. This is your vertical safe area, and it is the single most useful guide in this job.
Composition rule: faces, hands, the product and the key action live inside the 405-pixel column. Walls, shelves, sky, background students and extras fill the 16:9 wings, which can be cropped away without losing information. If a panel is designed this way, the same drawing works in both formats.
For the three or four beats where the vertical genuinely needs different framing (probably the crest reveal and the closing logo lock-up), do not redraw from scratch - duplicate the panel, re-crop and re-compose the background. That is minutes, not hours.
Result: 22 master panels plus roughly 4 vertical variants, not 44 panels. Annotate both safe areas on the contact sheet and label each panel 'shared' or 'has 9:16 variant', so the Chennai animator can match versions without emailing you.
2. What resolution, file format and delivery method do you choose, and why - given 8 GB of RAM and a 4 Mbps recipient?
Read the worked answer
Small, numbered, flattened JPEGs plus one PDF contact sheet, sent as a link.
Working files: one PSD per scene with three or four named layers (BG / characters / annotation / guides), and the guides switched off before export. Low RAM punishes big layered files, so keep the panel canvases small and flatten anything that is finished.
Export: JPEG, quality 80, at 1280 x 720. A full-colour board at that size lands around 150-300 KB, so 22 panels is comfortably under 20 MB even before compression - the 4 Mbps constraint disappears. PNG would be three to five times larger for no visible gain at board stage.
Delivery package:
- A PDF contact sheet, 3-4 panels per page, panel number and dialogue beneath each - this is what the animator reads first.
- A folder of individual JPEGs named S01_P01_v03.jpg, so a single panel can be found in seconds.
- A one-page note listing the 9:16 variants.
Send by Drive or WeTransfer link, never as email attachments. Keep v01/v02/v03 folders so nobody opens a superseded panel. And keep the layered PSDs until the promo is signed off - the animator will ask for a specific layer within a week.
3. The final script lands on Thursday at 4 pm with a new opening and ending. What do you do in the next hour, and what exactly do you deliver on Friday?
Read the worked answer
Say it within the hour, in writing, with a plan attached - not with an apology.
First, work out the damage. Eighteen panels came from a synopsis that no longer exists; a new opening and a new ending almost certainly invalidates 5-7 of them, and leaves roughly 26 hours to delivery including a night's sleep.
The email, sent before 5 pm:
- State the dependency plainly: the script changed at 4 pm Thursday; panels 1-3 and 19-22 were boarded from the synopsis and are now wrong.
- Propose a split delivery rather than a miss. Friday 6 pm: cleaned finals of the unchanged middle panels plus newly boarded versions of the new opening and ending. Monday: the remainder cleaned up and all 22 panels delivered as one consistent set.
- Offer the alternative the studio may actually prefer: a rough thumbnail pass of all 22 panels by Friday, complete but grey-box, then finals on Monday. A rough but complete board is far more useful for a Friday review than a polished half.
- Flag it as a schedule risk you raised in writing, and quote for the re-board if the script change was the client's decision.
Then start on the new opening, not on the panels you already like. If the Friday review decides the new opening's tone, everything after it may change again - so get that approved first and protect the week after, not just the deadline.