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Anything you need to know to develop a script. View various formats, download free templates, learn about scriptwriting software, network with other Chicago writers, check out film scripts.
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Developing storyboards, gathering crew, legalities of a shoot and various pre-production package materials.
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You Are Here: creation process: pre production: storyboarding: Storyboarding: Not Just Another Cartoon
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Storyboarding: Not Just Another Cartoon
by P. Reed McKerrow
| Storyboarding, the first step in visualizing your project, lays the foundation for the rest of your production. Find out how a little planning here can save you a lot of work later. |
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One of the best ways to really organize your production is with storyboards, which provide the blueprints for a smooth pre-production. |
They serve as the map for scheduling and budgeting-if you leave a shot out of your storyboards, chances are you won't schedule or budget for it.
Storyboards determine the location, number, and nature of camera setups, and they depict the essentials of shot-composition and camera movement. This allows you to plan your shoot so that similar camera angles are covered before you change lighting or strike sets-probably the biggest step you can take to streamline a production.
Storyboards also serve as a basic guide during production for the art, lighting, and camera departments. Though it's impossible to quantify, anyone who's been on set knows that when one of those little pictures speaks a thousand words to you, you've saved a lot of time and miscommunication-and that means money. Just make sure that everyone on set has access to them (post them by the M&Ms).
Storyboarding is also very important artistically, because for the first time in a project, two-dimensional images are developed and committed to paper. Many of the decisions made here about the way scenes are composed or juxtaposed will live all the way through the final cut, so careful attention to composition, matching action, and even continuity will really pay off both during production and in the editing room.
Storyboards can also facilitate pre-production planning or brainstorming sessions. And for productions that are still seeking funding or other forms of support, a well-constructed storyboard can generate a lot of momentum since it makes a good, albeit rough, funding trailer.
Two types of boards
There are two types of storyboards: static and animatic. We're all pretty familiar with static storyboards; animatics are simply static storyboards that account for time. An animatic is compiled from your initial stills into a movie. This can be as simple as a slide-show QuickTime or AVI movie, or as complex as a full-length version of your show with pans and tilts built in a multimedia authoring program or NLE. Some animatics even provide for a layer of interactivity to convey branching structures. But the basic idea is the same: to set your storyboards to narration or music, and to account for the timing of scenes. This is where you can reveal oversights like a missing closeup or cutaway, a scene that runs too long, or a camera move that takes more or less time than you anticipated.
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Put the pieces together
Once your storyboards are completed, they can fit neatly with the pre-production planning we've discussed in previous columns. For example, storyboards you've created in StoryBoard Artist |
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can be exported to MovieMagic Scheduler and placed as an illustration of each scene. And by carefully planning all of your shots as you complete your storyboards, you've now got the foundation for a reliable shot list you can use to accurately budget your shoot.
You can even back up one more step to the stage of story development. With tools like Dramatica Pro, Three By Five, or your favorite spreadsheet program, you can generate pictures (or even movies, in the case of Three By Five) to correspond to each scene as you're batting around ideas about your script's structure. Once your script has been completed, you can return to these images, import them into StoryBoard Artist, and refine them into final storyboards.
So what are some other options for storyboarding software? Three By Five, which operates on the metaphor of index cards posted on a bulletin board, is perfect for storyboards, especially when you consider that you can embed graphics or QuickTime movies. The simplest, and perhaps the cheapest, alternative is to integrate illustrations with a database program like FileMaker to annotate, organize, and shuffle your storyboards. With some FileMaker scripting, this might also be your most flexible solution. But if you're looking for an easy-to-use program with
powerful storyboarding capabilities right out of the box, StoryBoard Artist is the best way to go.
Excerpted from: http://www.dv.com/
This article was acquired on the "fair use" basis. We encourage you to visit the source website for more information on this topic. |
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