The Importance of Storyboarding
Filmmaking is about vision; it is as pure an art form as painting or acting. What people don’t know is that filmmaking-like all other art forms- takes planning at evert stage of the process. After the script is written, actors are cast, locations selected and everything is ready to roll, shots need to be planned.
To plan shots and a creative flow of your film, you need to make a storyboard. A storyboard is just a shot by shot illustration of how you envision your film to turn out. There are many ways to make your storyboard, you can print out a template, use software, or even just draw them out by hand.
Here at Seventy Six Films we like to be modern with our approach. We use Procreate software for IPad, and Boardfish for Macintosh. When drawing free hand with the Procreate software we find it’s best to use the Fiftythree stylus pencil. We draw all the panels in procreate and export the drawings straight onto the Sandisk iXpand USB, then load the pictures on to Boardfish to organize and put them into the storyboard template. From that point we type in the type of shot and description. Boardfish will let you add your company logo and headers and footers to give it that professional look.
When creating a storyboard, there are a few things that must be considered. You should comb through your script and figure out what is needed, and how it should be shot. Things you’ll need to plan are:
- Location
- Actors
- Props
- Lighting
- Special effects
- Type of shot, and angle
- Movement within shot
While drawing out each scene and determining all the above factors, you will be able to see if your concept will work, jumping from the written word to an actual visual conception of the idea, without wasting valuable time reshooting something in different styles.
Having a storyboard lowers the overall risk during production in many ways. Using a storyboard for any film project can communicate and visual ideas to clients and customers. Productions like feature films all the way down to commercials all use storyboards, and know the usefulness and potential of them. A properly done storyboard will not only help save time and money during a shoot, it can also help you make a better production..