Storyboarding!!

My class recently completed a workshop on storyboarding. We were taught that every film production including; Toy Story, Star Wars and even Breaking Bad has a storyboard! Productions include storyboards that help the film crew and director to see what the final product would look like, while making changes and adjustments where they see fit along the way.

The class had a go at drawing up some storyboards with the prompt of "man getting out of bed", seems simple enough?? Wrong. Me and many others soon found that drawing was wayyyy harder than we thought but we felt a lot better when we were shown a storyboard from Martin Scorsese AND IT WAS REALLY BAD.

As you can see, we learned that you don't need to be Picasso to have a good storyboard. Just a simple sketch will do!

After the poor attempt of drawing a man getting out of bed, we were taught a technique that would add perspective to our drawings which in turn would show the

camera operator what shot they should get. It involved drawing a horizon line and choosing vanishing points that all of the lines meet at to make the storyboard look 3D! After learning this new method, we redrew the man getting out of bed and it was looking way better! The drawing now had depth and more detail in perspective.

We had now learned the reasons for storyboarding and a technique to help show perspective. Now we had to improve our stick figures!! We were taught how draw people, starting with their spine then a circle for the head, a square for the body and a little oval for the hips.

Once we had drew the body, we started drawing the limbs. We put balls where all the joints would be and then we had skeleton! After we had this skeleton, we started to bulk it out by adding muscles, hands and feet. We now had the full body and all it needed is the final touches! This is where we added the iron man suit and voila! The human model was complete!! Using our new knowledge on perspective and character drawing, we redrew the man getting out of bed and the final result looked like a real storyboard!

I completed my own independent research into storyboards and discovered this one for No Country for Old Men (2007) that uses all the good techniques including indications for the camera operator on how to capture these scenes. The short film I am producing is a western and I and the rest of my team were influenced by the first scene in this storyboard as an establishing shot, and are deciding to put a scene similar to this at the start of our film

We now had our first storyboard and we were proud of our results!! Personally, I enjoyed this task as I have ambitions to write scripts! this helped me to see that to bring stories and scripts to life, you need to storyboard first to ensure the vison will be portrayed correctly to the director and camera operator. This workshop was helpful as in my future job of director or writer, I will need to have storyboards to be made to show my vision. I found this workshop difficult as it was hard to create accurate drawings on the storyboard. Compared to other workshops, this was hard as you need to establish a vanishing point in each of the drawings to make them life-accurate and this was hard to do for me. This workshop has taught me a lot about the production of films and I cant wait to use storyboarding in my projects!!! ( Just like Scorsese )