R+P Post 11: Our Timeline

It was a group decision to create a timeline as part of the pre-production process. Having seen the timelines that previous year groups had created, we decided that a timeline would help us condense the ideas we agreed upon in the early development of our project and place them into one physical document that we could easily refer to later on.

We were provided with a blank timeline by our teacher. The timeline is split horizontally into three categories:

• Visual track - this is where we denoted our ideas for framing, camera movement, mise-en-scene, and characters, as well as when the titles and credits would come in. 
• Voice track - this is where we denoted the basic idea of what we wanted our characters to say in  each shot.
• Sound track - this is where we denoted our ideas for what sounds we would need to hear, such as the opening and closing of doors, and when our music would come in

On the left hand side, the contents of each horizontal section is described concisely

We decided to use it because the way the timeline was like meant we could spread our ideas across multiple timelines for the different aspects of our film opening, thus avoiding a cluttered document. For the introduction of each new shot, music, sound or piece of dialogue, we drew a vertical line, and the end of each would be indicated by a second vertical line. As each of the three sections were already divided in two by a horizontal line, we took advantage of that in some cases, for instance to separate our ideas for sound design and soundtrack. Visually, this made for a very clear document, as we could clearly see what sound, piece of music or dialogue corresponded with it's shot as the vertical lines would match them up. It was also our first look at how we could keep each new element of the story interesting, for instance with camera techniques such as arcs and zooms. 

The timeline was also split vertically into three sections: the beginning, middle and end. This is in compliance with Todorov's theory of a three part narrative structure. Because the story for our opening sequence involved introducing a large cast of characters and some establishing plot exposition in a short space of time, we found the way the timeline was organised would benefit us, as we would notice when the back-and-forth between the characters in the middle would need to be more pacy in order to hold the audience's interest, and we would also know how to spread the conveying of information to the audience so that it was evenly distributed across the three parts, so the audience wasn't confused by a sudden overload of information.

As you can see, there was a lot of information to convey in the middle and end of our timeline. The timeline's three-part structure helped us condense our ideas so that we could visualise how our narrative would developers concisely and coherently as possible. This meant our finished timeline had enough content to convey our story, but the information is delivered evenly throughout the opening so that the audience is neither overwhelmed with information, or bored by he lack of any new story development.

The time signatures across the time line displayed ten second intervals from start to finish, which ended at two minutes. Although we decided not be too strict with how long our shots would be this early in pre-production, this did allow us to see how we could condense our ideas to fit the brief's requirement of keeping the opening to two minutes.

Our finished timeline

Our timeline was very useful when referring back to how we wanted our story to be structured, and it helped enormously when creating our storyboard, because it meant we had the decisions about the order of our shots and the audio that accompanied them ready made by the time we were making the storyboard, meaning time wasn't wasted during the production of shot types for the storyboard discussing how the plot would develop etc. We continually refer back to the timeline as it is by our edit suite.