Storyboarding

     My next step in the film-making process was the storyboard. This was an interesting step, and one of the steps that I’ll do a little differently next time. To start the storyboard, again my mentor sent me some sites to help me get started, because previously I’d only briefly touched on this in my video production and animation studies.

• http://vimeo.com/videoschool/lesson/4/storyboarding-basics
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-yeI83fN6s

     So, although I could have started with an online template, because there are a ton of them, I instead decided to simply stencil my library card onto some printer paper. That gave me nine frames per page, which ended up being plenty. I enjoyed this process quite a bit, even though it was tedious and I am not artistic at all (see below).

This is the storyboard for scene one, when Simon is sleeping/watching the projection television.

     It was fun to take what I was seeing while writing the script and try to portray it visually. It also made me think a lot more about camera shots and angles and movement et cetera. I had to consider where each actor would be standing in relation to the camera, when/if the camera would move or zoom, which angles could I recycle within a scene in order to take less time with shooting, and many many other things that don’t generally cross your mind when you’re simply writing a script of dialogue.

This is the story board for the title sequence and beginning of scene 2 when Simon enters the coffee shop. This shot stayed fairly true through production.

     The main thing that I would change about this process would be to complete it after location scouting. I found out very quickly when we began shooting that the settings I had drawn all the actions and movements around didn’t always fit the locations we had actually found to shoot at. Next time I will definitely plan to create my story boards with my actual settings in mind. But it did help me gain the experience with storyboarding and gave me many general camera angles to draw from in actual production, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

Next up, location scouting….

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