Story Boarding

A nice storyboard from 'Good Behavior'

Whilst I am quite happy to pick up a pencil and start sketching, this is usually when I’m designing things for manufacture. I have been taught drawing skills on how to construct objects and so totally get that this is about communication and getting ideas across to the reader without a verbal commentary.
My entire drawing experience pre-film course has been very figurative with still life, life drawing and perspective and technical drawing to create products. These are all good skills to have to construct images, but I have no experience of Illustrative art other than the comics that I drew as a child and feel my images lack something (maybe consistency in style?) to really sell the storyboard as a whole to the reader. Due to this and because I quite enjoy the process I would like to improve my storyboarding skills. There are lots of guides to storyboarding freely available from practitioners and to this end I have been studying these to try to pick up tips and tricks. 

Dev. of hangmen, silent interaction.

As in my design work I sketch and develop, I often use the reverse of filled storyboard templates to help with composition in busier shots or to work out a sequence of shots, before committing an image to the printed frame and the previous images (using a different sheet to the one you are working on makes life easier when copying the image). When reproducing a template framed images I frequently use a window like a lightbox to trace through, on an evening I use my tablet screen for the same, which can be handy.

Key aspects that I have been trying to employ are to;

• Try to stick to the key frames of a shot when drawing a sequence over a series of frames, to emphasise the objective of the shot and not lose the point due to superfluous action detail clogging the images. The world being created needs filling out with backgrounds and expected details the director wants to include in the shot, this puts the image into context for the audience and to help them recognise ‘the vision’. This creates a world for the action to be entered into. This must be tempered by not making the image so busy as to not see the wood for the trees.
• Try to create a look to key character to make them recognisable in each shot frame (spiky hair, curly hair etc.) and to not have to notify the reader of the characters identity in a shot.
• Apply film making and drawing rules to the image, adding some perspective and shading to a drawing also brings scale to the vision with depth to the image. An accurate representation of rule of thirds within the frame and considered composition to the image rather than noting that it should be in txt and as always to comply with the 180° rule.
•  Illustrate camera movement also within the frame (other than shaky-cam) with zooms, wides, tracking, panning and tilting shown with arrows and cropped frames or drawing outside of the frame.
  

Courtroom development sheet

 For final draft storyboards using larger frames (I like a single frame A4 storyboard) for more complex shots makes illustrating and adding detail easier. Doing this for an entire story board really helps with presentation when reduced. I want to create a branded Photoshop/Gimp template storyboard that scanned large frame images can be added to in layers to be reduced in size and re-positioned easily within the .PSD template storyboard frames easily, for printing/publication of the end product. These individual images can then be reordered to suit easily as shots change without having to be redrawn.

Page from 'The execution' storyboard

 Many people are not so confident with pencil and paper, indeed this is why they are attracted to AV recording. Using photo storyboards usually describe shots well to the crew but make it difficult to set up the world the story exists in to an outside observer, or relying on the written word to fill detail with stick men images that tell you nothing visually still rely on a verbal commentary to accompany the document to make it coherent. I think that this often goes down to ‘the fear’ of being judged on drawing skills “I’m not a very good drawer” or often simply “I can’t draw” is an enabler to skim over it as a process, overlooking what can be done regardless of whether horses look like dogs or cattle, which shows to the reader.  

Page from 'The execution' storyboard

I have thought many times that a talk by an illustrator in first year when introduced to storyboarding would be a help, which it would, but the truth is improvement is a process in its own right which only comes with practice.

I want to construct a storyboard template for my K3 camera which when converted to super16mm will not display the extra width of the image through the viewfinder, and so I require a storyboard frame that has an aspect ratio of super 16 at 1.66:1 with the original 16mm 4:3 ratio nestled within it to display the missing portion of viewable image through the camera and a 16:9 ratio nestled within that to display the desired widescreen export aspect ratio, this story board will aid the camera op with the composition of shots also when using the K3.

Ultimately a story board is a development tool for the director to help compose thoughts and develop shots cinematically as they become more and more involved with the storyboard creation process. Its not just a document for the use of others. 

Last tip…don’t be afraid to colour in outside the lines!