Friday, December 9, 2016

Boardfish

I've teamed up with some old friends to make a new Mac application, Boardfish, a tool for creating storyboards. Make panels in the graphics app of your choosing and drag them in. Boardfish will let you arrange them, add captions, and export to a PDF.
Boardfish is the brainchild of Matt Silverman, who runs the production studio Swordfish. (I've known Matt since forever, starting with ElectricImage user groups at the turn of the century.) At Swordfish, Matt & co. have often made storyboards using general purpose tools like InDesign, but making changes to the layouts was a pain. Matt thought it would be worth it to make an app dedicated to storyboards, so he brought me in to do the programming, Mauchi Baiocchi for creative input, and Brandon Smith for everything else (including the docs and website). Together, we are Mekajiki Inc.

When it comes down to it, Boardfish is basically a page layout app—a procedural one. Virtually everything about the layout of the boards is exposed: the number of panels on a page, the typeface and font size of each text element, the width and color of every line. Boardfish lets you make global changes instantly.

There's a free trial. Give it a whirl!