23.02.10
Developing your ideas and storyboarding
John Campbell received his MA in film from the International Film School, Wales. He won the cinematography award at the Bristol International Film Festival for a short film called Blue Morning You in 1999. He now works as a freelance film maker for public bodies and arts organisations across the UK and Europe.
The birth of film
Film was born in 1872, when Leland Stanford asked Eadweard Muybridge to photograph a galloping horse using 24 stereoscopic cameras, therefore producing the first moving image using a zoetrope. In 1895 Robert W Paul’s invention of the film projector allowed for the first public showing of moving images. People soon realised the significance of this new spectacle. The Lumiere brothers sent operators out all over the world to shoot with their Cinematographe device, and they created almost 2,000 films by 1903. These films reflected everyday life: trains pulling into stations, people leaving work at the factory. Known as ‘actualities’ or slices of life, they were the first documentaries. Now, more than 100 years later, the filming process is available to everyone, meaning you can easily make any experience, from a day out with friends to a family event, into your own documentary, or even a fun little short. No matter what you want to do, you’re going to have to plan everything to make it the best it can be.
Developing your ideas
First comes the idea — without the idea you have no film. The chances are, at this stage for you, it will be an event. Take a wedding. There is a couple who have fallen in love and have decided to spend the rest of their lives together. This is one of the most important days of their lives so far, so reflecting the day as a journey that we are witnessing will engage the people who watch the film afterwards. With a simple structure, we can plan the top five most important aspects — who, what, when, where and how — rather than random shots of stuff going on.
Top tip
Since you are now making films with titles and credits, make sure when you get people’s details that you write them down immediately and check you have the correct spelling. Nothing will cause embarrassment quite like getting the vicar’s name wrong. It will also detract from all the hard work you have put into filming and editing your piece.
The top five questions
Who, what, where, when and how are the fundamental questions you must ask yourself from the outset, whether you’re shooting documentary or drama.
Who is going to see the film?
Is the final product for children or adults? Friends and family? Knowing your audience allows you to choose subject matter and content. If you are filming a wedding and you are going to show a family, they know beforehand who is involved, so you don’t need to introduce the main players. But if you are on holiday and you visit a farm, the audience will need to know what sort of farm it is, what sort of animals are there etc. What other information do you need to get across? Can you interview the owner of the farm quickly?
What are you going to film?
A wedding? A sports event? Is it an observation piece where you are filming from a distance, or are you able to speak to people and have their thoughts on camera? For example, can you interview the bride and/or groom as they get ready before the wedding, capturing the nervous excitement and such?
Where are you going to film?
A church for a wedding, the reception, the evening party? Do you need permission? This is very common regarding religious institutions and especially filming anywhere where children are present. Registry office weddings are quite often held in town halls, and you may have a problem if you just turn up and start filming, so check first. Most places and people are extremely accommodating if you explain everything and then ask them if it’s okay. Assuming that you are allowed to film will inevitably end with you throwing all your good planning out of the window.
When is it all happening?
There’s nothing worse than turning up at the wrong time or even on the wrong day. This is the most basic of mistakes, but potentially a very costly one. Get the date down in your diary and confirm it. You would be surprised at how many times, even in professional circles, this simplest and most obvious thing has not been checked. And how?
How are you going to get access to the places and people?
Sometimes projects grind to a halt because the lines of communications have failed. I know this sounds rudimentary, but I have been on film sets where a breakdown in communication has left the shoot at a standstill. Get a list of phone numbers you will need, the addresses of locations etc. This is imperative for a one-time deal like a wedding.
How long is the film going to be?
Having an idea of this will help set the structure of your film as you want it to be nicely paced. It should be as long as it needs to be. Why film hours of shaky wobbly footage that doesn’t focus on anything when you could plan for 10 minutes of well thought-out sequences? This rule carries across all film making, from amateurs to professionals, from full-length features to 30-second ads. This is one of the key skills every film maker must learn and act on intuitively. Having all the memory on your cards filled up too early means you may compromise and fail to capture later aspects of an event. Set a maximum amount of footage to be shot and/or memory to be used for each part of the day. Learn more about this in the section on storage. With all this worked out, you can then quickly write an outline of your film, and from this short ‘treatment’, you can begin to think about storyboarding.
Some thoughts on storage
You should consider storage before you ever even press record on your camera. Be aware that, when filming on DSLRs with HD film capabilities, a 2GB card will only record five minutes of footage. This is why it is imperative to plan ahead and know your shots before you take them. A good rule of thumb for gauging how much space will be used is to allow 14GB of space for every hour of DV video. HD footage is a lot more — 2GB for five minutes. Don’t fill any drive to its maximum capacity. When you come to edit, temporary files will be saved, which take up a lot of space. Leave about 30% extra space for such processes. I once lost a whole day clearing my drives to accommodate processes for editing. All other digital media should be on an external device. It allows you to move material around easily and will speed up your processing. Do as the pros do: go external.
Storyboarding
- A ‘treatment’ is a movie industry term for a brief outline of your film, from beginning to end. Once you have jotted this down, you can use it as the outline for your storyboard.
- A storyboard is a series of images or illustrations that are laid out in a sequence, allowing the film maker to visualise the intended film or animation. I believe storyboarding is essential when shooting both fact and fiction because it makes you familiar with your subject matter, whether it is a wedding or your home made zombie movie.
- At this point you may be saying ‘I can see why you would use it for fiction, but why documentary?’ The answer is because you’re observing a story as it reveals itself to you. This may be the most simple of tales and easy to predict, but by being prepared, shooting on the day will go that much smoother.
- Don’t be afraid if you can’t draw — use stick figures or even write in possible scenarios. The whole exercise is about getting your idea down on paper, becoming familiar with it and therefore allowing for a better shoot.
- Illustrating your film scene by scene reveals the structure and identifies where your priorities should be when shooting. The boards give you a tangible guide so you don’t miss anything important and also indicate how you should divide your time on the shoot, even down to gauging how much battery level you have and how much storage you’ll need for each sequence.
- Things will always be slightly different on the day to what you plan, but if you are fully prepared, you’ll be better equipped to deal with any issues that arise. You can also, when possible, use photographs instead of drawings or words for your storyboard, if you have scouted locations and the such beforehand.
- Here is a storyboard of the first part of a wedding day The images are very basic — apologies, I never claimed to be Michelangelo. It doesn’t need to be perfect; a loose idea is more than adequate. Notice, too, that I have written a brief description underneath each scene. Once you have storyboarded your entire scenario, you’re one step closer to being ready for the day of shooting.
Using stills to create a movie
An animation is a series of images, whether photographs or illustrations, that are used in sequence to make a film. Here, I will show you a simple but effective way to make a title sequence using a series of photographs. You can copy my ‘writing in the sand’ theme, or use the same principle to introduce your own work with lipstick on a mirror, writing on a fogged-up car window, or pouring out salt on a table. You could even consider playing about with the concept to make a larger film entirely in this style.
The best thing about this exercise is that it will make you think about exactly what you are shooting, shot by shot, as stills, and how they end up as a movie when run together, so that when you come to use the movie mode on your DSLR, you will have a clear understanding of how to structure what you shoot to tell a story.
For a film of a recent trip to Tenby in west Wales, I decided to make the titles there and then and not in post production. I used the local beach as the framing, as this is one of the town’s main attractions. The idea was to write the words ‘A Trip to Tenby’ so they would magically appear on the sand, then have the camera tilt up to reveal my partner, who then turns and slides off across the beach.
To create photographs suitable for an animated sequence, I first made sure I had a sturdy tripod and enough memory card space. The reason for this is that films run at 25 frames a second, which means that one frame is 1/25 of a second — in effect, that’s 25 photographs a second. Most animations have around 12 frames a second (this is an arbitrary figure, as it can be any number of frames depending on the style of your animation). The more frames there are, the smoother the animation. The fewer frames, the jitterier the animation becomes — not always a bad thing.
Due to the limitations of Moviemaker, I can only make each photograph a minimum length of three frames — that’s 1/8 of a second, leading to a choppy-style effect you will see on the final version on the PM website.
Moviemaker set-up
Click the Tools tab on the taskbar at the very top of the screen. In the dropdown menu, click Options. A window will appear. Click the Advanced tab, this will switch to the advanced menu. This panel is where you tell Moviemaker how to interpret your footage. The top section allows you to change the length of your stills. You can set each photo to a desired length and Moviemaker will do the trim on its own. So where it says ‘Picture duration’, the default setting is five seconds, which means each stills clip would be five seconds long. That’s too long in this case, so decrease the value until the number stops changing. It should read ‘0.125 seconds’. This means your stills will only be around 1/8 of a second long rather than five seconds. You don’t need to worry about transition duration for this exercise, so leave the defaults as they are. The middle section deals with video format and aspect ratio. Video format changes depending on the country in which you are likely to view your film. PAL is for the UK, so make sure you have the PAL box checked. Make sure the 16:9 box is checked.
Create your movie
First import your stills. You can use this technique in either the timeline view or storyboard view, which I use. Click your first image. Scroll to the bottom of your images. Hold down the Shift key and click your last image. All the images should be highlighted. Drag and drop the images onto any empty slot on the storyboard. All your images should have dropped into sequence. Now all you need to do is press Play and view your new animation. You can either carry on making a film by adding video or images after the sequence, or ideally — and this is a good tip for Moviemaker users — make this sequence into a named movie of its own. You can then re-import it as many times as you like, and you won’t have to worry about a cluttered work area.
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