The importance of storyboarding

In today's class we were all discussing the importances of doing a storyboard, and how it is so helpful when it comes to filming and editing.

A storyboard is a 'blue print' to your film.

A storyboard is a graphical representation of the camera shots in a film sequence which are connected together to create a 'narrative flow'. It is similar in appearance to a comic strip. The story of the film is visualised by a series of drawings which depict the location, character, props and setting of each shot. Beneath the images there are captions detailing action, camera directions, lighting directions and sometimes basic dialogue. 

A storyboard allows you to translate you visual ideas on to paper, and to the crew who are helping you film. It should be clear enough that if you weren't available on the day of shooting, any cinematographer could take the storyboard and shoot it and edit it precisely.

In the pre-production stage,  the director and the production designer will discuss how to achieve the right look and feel of the film by planning the sets and costumes. Then storyboard artist will then be brought in to draw up the director's rough storyboards adding any necessary details and creating a detailed version with action, camera and lighting directions. Then the director and DOP to see the flow of shots and the movements of the camera and actors. It is better to have too many shots in the storyboard, and then when it comes to cutting it is much easier. It will also enable to see if there are an major gaps or shot which didn't make sense. 

When it comes to showing motion on a storyboard, there are multiple way in which you can do this. You could draw arrows and then simply follow them, or you can draw motion lines, which more subtly shows the direction in which the camera would move. The final way is drawing multiple frames, this way works just the same as the others, but much more detail and more time consuming. 

Your storyboards should always be designed to communicate the narrative flow of the story as clearly as possible to your production crew. The Drawings should be clean and simple, arrows should be bold and helpful, and annotation should be brief rough storyboards can be drawn on storyboards sheets on large sheets of plain paper in sketch books or even on the backs of envelopes. The final drafts storyboards, however should be designed on quality paper with the care and attention that the music video deserves. 

In the post-production stage, it helps with the editing as it allows the editing team see the order of shots and the transition needed at the end or beginning or particular shots. 

Finally, you don't have to be a top artist in order to storyboard. As long as it gets across the order and flow of the film, it's great. Even Steven Spielberg drew stick men!