Storyboard

Another Friday brings another day preparing for filming. Though for our 4003 Group Production we are doing a documentary, it is still good practice and will be useful for future productions to look at storyboarding and the most useful way to go about doing this.

Though traditional storyboards are thought of as endless pieces of scibbly paper drawings, again we can use Celtx to create a more visual, tidy and portable storyboard for our productions. Today we were given a one scene script, and after finding the beats within the scene and deciding upon our shot types we took the Panasonic cameras out and shot individual pics for each shot to upload to Celtx.

 

Celtx allows you to upload each photo into its storyboard layout, select shot type from the drop down menu and add a short description of your shot. Once you have done this you can play these pictures within the programme as a slideshow which will include the short description as shown below:

For a more universal file format you could also use your sequence of images in Quicktime Pro, set how long you wish to spend on each photo and export it as a Quicktime Movie. The downside of this is you cant include the text but it does give you a good idea of how the scene will flow. This is what our images from this mornings exercise came to as an outline to the scene. (Please ignore my face at 10secs...Ed knows how to capture me at my worst obviously!)




The useful thing about making a storyboard in this manner is that is gives opportunity to practice the framing of shots without the actual actors having to be present. As you can see the photos don't need to be very precisely done and don't need to be well acted to give you an idea of what you want to include in a scene.