The Storyboard

After writing the script, the next step (or at least for me) in my short film process was to create the storyboard. For something which was essentially ‘just drawing pictures’, to be honest, it was a little bit of a challenge.

Maybe this is because I expected it to be easier as I’m more of a visual person than a written one (wait, sorry, but you keep a fairly wordy blog?? Yes, but that’s different)! I think mainly though, it was because it felt quite relentless: there were soooo many shots/ panels/ boards (whatever they’re called in the biz) and to get what was in my head accurately down on the page was pretty tough. It was also hard to know what kind of shot might work best to visually get what’s on the page successfully to the screen without making it feel confusing or disorientating to the viewer.

The current storyboard stands at 175 panels (I think there may be a little redrafting yet to come), which feels quite a lot for a 12 page script (so approximately a 12 minute runtime). As the film isn’t going to contain any camera movements, I perhaps needed to use more shots to get some of the action across, instead of using a single camera move if the camera could be used to track/ pan etc. I’m planning on shooting the whole thing using a tripod, because it will be the simplest way to add the backgrounds in afterwards- I’m shooting in essentially an empty room, bar a few props/ furnishings, so pretty much everything else needs to be drawn in post. The most efficient way of doing this would be to not make any shots over complicated with moving the camera (or at least not until post-prod) or it’ll make my job creating backgrounds a lot, lot harder.

I know I said it was challenging at times, but despite this, I did find it quite fun on the whole. I actually ended up asking my partner Ben to pose for me (thank you) so I had an accurate reference to go off. I then comped the photos I took of him on top of other reference photographs to create a full image, which I would then draw over and fill in anything which I didn’t get on the photos. This worked really well and it felt like a really smooth process. It also helped clear a couple of things up for me in terms of logistics for the impending shoot…

I used Callipeg to draw the images with and put it together in TVPaint- it has a wonderful storyboard feature integrated in the program. Something I have only just learnt about after having been using the software for 6 years! They have several brilliant tutorials on their YouTube channel which explains how to work it.