2D Computer Animation Workshop: Exposure Sheets - Part 1
A simple way to make a spiffy electronic exposure sheet
September 02, 1999
By Emru Townsend
I have a confession to make: for a few years, I never
used dope sheets (otherwise known as exposure sheets) for animation. I only
started after I found myself in a camera room at 3:00 AM, wired on chocolate-covered
espresso beans and Jolt cola, trying to make sense of the scribbled notes
that passed for my camera instructions.
When I started using dope sheets, I discovered that I didn't like them much,
mainly because they couldn't withstand my improvisational nature: during
the planning stages, I kept erasing and rewriting until the sheets were
only held together by a few fibers. And when I really went nuts (or just
wasn't paying attention), I'd run out of usable sheets. Is it any wonder
I started creating my dope sheets digitally? Of course, in those days I
used Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS for the task; I could only dream of making the
spiffy dope sheet template we're going to put together in this installment.
What you need:
A. A spreadsheet program. For my examples, I'll be using Excel 97 for Windows.
Before doing anything, we'll need to figure out the kind of paper we're
printing on, and how much space we've got for our printout. While we're
at it, we'll enter the production information in the header, so that it
will print on every page of the finished sheets.
1. From the menu, select File, Page Setup. Click on the Page
tab.
2. Select the paper size from the Paper size combo box. We'll use
Legal for this example.
3. Click on the Margins tab. Set the top margin to 1", the left
and right margins to .75", and the bottom margin to .5". Set the
header to .25", and footer to 0".
4. Check the Horizontally box in the "Center on page" section.
5. Click on the Header/Footer tab.
6. Click Custom Header.
7. In the Left section box, enter Scene:, press ENTER, then
enter Sequence:. You'll be able to enter the sequence and scene numbers
here later.
8. In the Center section box, enter the production's title.
9. In the Right section box, enter Page, press the spacebar,
and click on the page number button.
10. Click OK.
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