R+P Post 12: Our Storyboard

Our group decided to make a storyboard during pre-production. During our preliminary task, we created some storyboards before we did our shoot. Although this task involved more than twice as much content, we found that the way in which we created our storyboard in our prelim would be very beneficial when deciding the look of our shots, allowing the ability to alter and change our ideas throughout the pre-production process, and finally having some visual representation of our film opening. 

Our final storyboard - the post-its are stuck down with Blu-Tac so things can change right up until the main shoot

Our teacher provided us with a resource on which we could put down our ideas for our storyboard, which was an A3 piece of paper which was split in similar fashion to our timeline into beginning, middle and end. We decided that this resource would benefit us because the three-part structure would help make it easier to translate the information from our timeline to our storyboard, and keep our documents consistent in their layout.

We decided to use different coloured post-it notes to represent the different shots on our storyboard.

The use of post-it notes was a tactic we practiced when we did our prelim, and it was very successful, so we decided to use the same technique again. On the post-its, we drew a simple pencil image of what the contents of each shot, using stick figure to show where people were in the shot and what the were doing. We wrote some basic dialogue and action directions by the characters so we knew what they were doing/saying, and wrote the first letters of the character's names above their heads so we knew who was in the shot - this was very useful seeing as we have many characters to get confused with in our opening. We also indicated character movements with thin arrows, and camera movements with big arrows. Sometimes, we used more than one post-it to represent one shot, for instance, when we needed to show the before and after of a pan or zoom. 

We worked through the storyboard from start to finish, sharing the work load of drawing the shots between the three of us to cut down on time.

As the key above the storyboard shows, the different colours are representative of the different shot types, and in the corner of each post-it, we wrote an abbreviation for the specific type of shot we wanted (for example, we'd have a blue post-it for a close up, then write ECU in the corner to mean 'extreme close up'). We decided to do this so that we could visualise the diversity of framing in the opening, so if a sequence of shots were all mid-shots, for example, we could spot it by their colours and consider changing some of the framing in that sequence to keep it interesting visually. This was especially important for our opening sequence; because a lot needs to be conveyed to the audience, including a lot of plot points and characters, it is easy for the audience to become bored by the constant stream of information, so it is very important to keep the look of the opening as visually striking as possible. 

The use of post-its also meant nothing was permanently fixed to the storyboard, meaning we could easily change the order of shots and add new shots in when things needed changing. 

The storyboard is one of our most frequently referenced documents, and is stuck to the wall by our edit suite so we can constantly refer to it, for instance, when need to see the order of our shots when we are editing.  We plan to keep expanding and improve upon our storyboard by adding and subtracting shots to it as our ideas and the story evolve in preparation for the main shoot.