Storyboards guidance
- 1. Storyboards – for your Treatment in Part 4 You have to createyour storyboard asan originaldocument during the controlled assessment timebut you can prepareit completelyin advance so you know exactlywhat it’sgoing to look like when you’re done. This is intended as a detailed guideto creating a storyboard. Therearenotes following this about writing your justification. a) You canhand-draw and hand-labela storyboard on a templatewe provide. Thisis not an art task, it is a design task – if you can draw well then that is lovely but if you can’t draw well it doesn’t matter solong as you canclearly show and label what you’ve done. I can’t draw at all but I canstill createa hand-drawnstoryboard. Thereisa blankstoryboard form attached b) You can createa photographicstoryboard –you can take photographsfor each shot that you need and thenlabel thephotographs appropriately. You canedit thephotographsinany way necessary. c) You canuse a storyboarding app or program tocreateyour storyboard. This might involve uploading some imagesof your own and using some of the imageresourcesthey provide. So what do we meanby a competent storyboard, with proficient preproductionskillsand a high technicalstandard and qualitythat illustratetheintentionsof your adaptation? 1. A good storyboard ismuch more thana comic strip adaptationof a moving imagetext. It is a detailed shot by shot plan for a scene, containing clear and detailed technicalproductioninformationaswell as a clear visual designfor each shot. 2. It will containinformationabout shot duration, camera shot, camera movement, diagetic and non-diagetic sound, and editing, aswell as about performance –the actual‘content’of theshot. It mayalso contain specific informationabout miseen scene and iconography, especiallyif they are particularlyrelevant to your plans for making meaning within the shot. 3. It is not an ‘Art’ task – you don’t have to producebeautifulphotorealistic drawingsand you don’t have to take photographs(although you cando either) – thebest storyboardscanclearly demonstratethebest design ideasusing simplepencil sketchesof shapes, labelled with moredetailed visual informationasis required.
- 2. 4. It is a technicaldocument aswell as a creativedocument –it has to have all of the technicalinformationincluded inpoint 2 above in order to do itsjob. So what do we need? Image You need a clear sense of what the shot is going to look like, with some attentionpaid tothe key mise en scene detailsin theshot. Thisis not quiteas easy as it sounds. QuickTask: draw a storyboard frameof an over-the-shoulder shot of a manstanding on the street at the gateof a house looking up the path at the front door. It’s worth making yourself thinkcarefully about every frame by looking through a lens – you could do it with your phone – to thinkabout what your plans will actuallylook like. Some basics… Don’t draw stickpeople, becausetheybear no resemblanceto what the screen will actuallylook like. Bubble people arefine. Higher quality representationalimagesaregreat ifyou can do them. A clear sense of shapeand colour is important –you can use little scribbled shadesof colour as well as annotation. Key aspectsof mise en scene and iconographyshould be obviously there in the frameand should be mentioned in annotation. Thinkabout planes of focus – are you using a deep focusshot, so everything is in focus in the foreground and background, or do you have one shallow plane of focus so the rest is blurring? Which leadsto… Movement in the shot – do you pull focus withintheshot? A manlooks down the street, in an OTS shot, and over four seconds we pull focus from foreground to background. You can’t draw that ina singledrawing but it canbe clear in your annotation. Movement in the shot – you canuse arrowswithintheframeand annotationtoexplainhow people/cars/whatever movewithinthe shot Camera movement withintheshot – thereare two waysof dealing with this. If there is one simple camera movement – Character POV ashe looks at the door and then tiltsup to look at the upstairswindow – you canuse arrowsand annotation. Ifit’s a long lasting shot with a lot of different images (thinkof Shaun’s walk to the newsagentsand home again in‘Shaun of the Dead’) you should treat thesingle shot as a series of shots on the storyboard, drawing them separately, with a clear note that thereis no edit from frameto framebut it is one single shot.
- 3. Shot Duration Thinkabout it, talkthrough your actionand timeit, do it againand time it again, and then think about it again. What ishappening ina single shot and how long will it actuallytaketo happen? What kind of rhythm do you want to develop for the scene? Is the tension building up, shot by shot, so should the shot durationsbegetting shorter? Doyou suddenly burst intoan actionsequencethat needs lots of very quickshots? Do you want a regular rhythm of shot durationtomatch thebeat of the soundtrack? And how long will the whole sequence last, and how long does it taketo get to the ‘meat’of thescene, and how long does the scene last after the mainpoint of the scene has been achieved, and does that work for you? Golden rule – Get In. Get Done. Get Out. Camera Shot and Movement Describethe shot with thecorrect technicalterm. Mid shot? Extreme close up? High angle POV close up? Aswith ‘movement withintheshot’ above, describecamera movement with thecorrect technicalterm –pan, track, tilt, cant, zoom… Diagetic and Non-Diagetic Sound Diagetic –madewithintheworld of the film. Dialogue, traffic sounds, music on the radio, spacealiens with their spacealien ships and space alien ray guns. If you were there in the scene, you would hear it. Non-diagetic –not madewithinthe world of the film. Background music and voiceover. It’s there for the audience – if you were there in the scene you wouldn’t hear it. You need to specificallyidentifytheuse of both types of sound – or to identifythat thereis no non-diageticsound in the shot (of very occasionallyno diagetic sound – completesilence can be very effective used in the right way). For diagetic sound, you can use broad termsto describethe obvious. ‘Ambient noise’is fine for someone walking down thestreet, you don’t need to say ‘carsgoing by, birdssinging, a few voices of people talking, footsteps – unless withinthat ‘ambientnoise’there is something specific that needsto be highlighted (thefootstepsof the person following you, the car that isslowing down as it approachesyou causing you to look at it). For ‘non-diagetic sound’you need to be specific – both about exactly what pieceof music you are using, and the extent towhich the music will
- 4. dominatethesoundtrack(sometimesit will be all you hear, sometimesit will be mixed with dialogueor other diageticsound). The best sound work makesdiagetic and non-diageticsound work closely together, and often makes them work in synch (or interestingly just out of synch) with editing. If non-diagetic sound isa particularlyimportantelement of the scene you arecreating, it would be a good idea to provide an .mp3or a .wav file of themusic you areplanning on using. Editing Thinkvery carefully before you decideto do anything more complex than a simplecut (other thanat the end of a scene, when you may well want to fade out or cross-fade). And then thinkagain. And then, as a rule that you need a very good reasonto break, decideto stickwith the simple cut. Beyond this – thinkabout building parallelediting intoyour scene and, as mentioned above, thinkabout how the editing workswith the sound. It’s very commonto ‘cut’ to thenew sound a half-second or so before you ‘cut’ to the new image(a ‘J-Cut’) or to cut to the new image before the sound cuts(an ‘L-Cut’) Both so called becauseof what they look like on the editing programmescreen. It can also be very good practicetocut with thebeat of the soundtrack. BUILDING A SEQUENCE Draw and annotatea storyboard for the RugbyN-Gagepromovideo, paying attentiontoall of the above issues.