People Who Use Flix

Flix is a software hub that brings many skilled people together from a multitude of disciplines in order to create a story. So just who are these different creatives using Flix and how does it help them?

Story Artists

A story artist is someone who converts a script into images. They are often referred to as storyboard artists, sketch artists, and illustrators. They usually come from a background of sketching with pen and paper and have taken up software tools like Photoshop and Storyboard Pro, which are now essential tools for digital storytelling.

What does Flix do for Story Artists?

Flix is designed to help speed up the process of generating sequences of storyboards. We know story artists spend a lot of time generating multiple iterations of storyboards, so the idea is that Flix sits in the background and should be thought of as an aid to the story artist. Story artists need to be able to sketch freely, then click a button in their preferred software to send that sketch to Production and keep working on the next idea. Your flow should not be interrupted, and this is where Flix is really useful to artists.

Let’s say you’ve sketched out a sequence of boards and sent it to Flix, but the production has requested a small change to one of the boards. With Flix open in the background, you can make a change to that board, save it, and Flix detects the change and updates the corresponding board straight away.

Story artists often work in large Photoshop files, which contain many layers to represent different poses for a character. It takes time to send a large file every time an artist updates it. Flix eliminates this waiting time. It takes the PSD file from Photoshop, optimizes it so you’re only sending what you need to display rather than all the hidden layers, and places it where you want it in the sequence. If you want to access those hidden layers, Flix stores the original PSD file so it’s always available. All of this is controlled from within Photoshop, so you can keep Flix open on a secondary screen to check that your board is going where it should in the sequence, and keep working in Photoshop.

For artists working in Storyboard Pro, you can keep building your sequence as you would normally and when you’re ready to send it to production for review, Flix imports your project file, retaining all your board timings. When you want to make changes, just keep working in Storyboard Pro and import the updated project file into Flix when it’s updated.

In Flix, story artists and production can add dialogue, make review comments, draw annotations on boards or record audio to go along with the timed playout of the sequence. The story artist is able to collaborate directly with the rest of the production team on the story creation process, all in one place.

Editors

Editors are the craftspeople who cut the sequences created in Flix into a complete motion picture, with audio and sound effects.

They may have come from splicing film together on Steenbeck machines, known as linear editing, though these methods have now been entirely replaced by digital editing, known as non-linear editing, or NLE. However, the principles are the same. Editors take the sequence as it’s been fashioned and timed in Flix, and expand on and tune the timing to maximise the narrative emotional effect. Just like where Story Artists’ skill lies in converting words to images, the editor’s skill is in timing the duration of images to engage an audience in the narrative and stimulate their emotions.

What does Flix do for Editors?

Flix handles the full roundtrip with Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere. When a sequence is ready to send to editorial, production staff press a button in Flix and those boards are packaged up and sent to Avid or Premiere in formats that both NLE apps expect. Production can decide if they want to retain the timing of the sequence as it was established in Flix, or simply send all the boards with a default duration and let editorial start from scratch.

Editors import the file Flix has created into their bin and a new Avid/Premiere Sequence is created based on the embedded metadata in the Flix file. Each board is represented on the timeline by a clip, which has its own naming convention, much the same as clips on a roll of camera rushes. This naming convention can be agreed ahead of time with editorial when the show is being set up in Flix.

Flix helps editors get a sense of how the story plays in realtime, without needing to imagine from looking at still images arranged in a row. Flix handles image formats from storyboarding apps and can read and write the file packages made for editorial software, so editors can simply grab the sequence as it has been laid out in Flix in the format they need. This way they have immediate access to the individual storyboards in video format without the need to convert or transcode anything.

Production

This group of people come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. It is made up of the director, producer, head of story/story supervisor, and all other staff members tasked with managing the production.

What does Flix do for a Production Team?

Flix is designed for filmmakers to iterate on sequences of storyboards until they produce a pre-viz version of the planned film that is a worthy representation of the final product. The aim is to go into production with a fully realised plan that hits the same emotional beats as the final film. With so much time and cost invested in feature-length animated films and TV series, Flix was created as a way of painlessly crafting the story in pre-production before those costs and time investments are fully committed.

Flix gives production people a comprehensive view of all the storyboards available and the overall story development. With Flix, Production has control over how the boards are and can comment, add annotations, request changes and review those changes once applied.

Flix stores, manages and organizes all versions of boards and sequences, so production people don’t need to worry about where the files are stored and if they’re named correctly. They also want to be able to manage and lock Show settings, such as enforcing naming conventions for files and default applications for editing and sketching. They want to be able to sign off on a sequence and send it straight to editorial with one click.

Directors signing off storyboards may often be out of the office, so they want visibility and easy access for the review process. Flix is a fully remote platform, allowing you to log in securely anywhere in the world to get access to your show and review story sequences.

Flix is the ultimate pre-production story development tool, bringing together and empowering people from multiple disciplines to fulfil the director's creative vision.