PBC - storyboarding

Storyboarding is actually a process I've come to really enjoy the past 3 years. I like the way it can entirely chance a story depending on the angle you chose for a shot or the length of time you hold the camera on that scene for. I find it very interesting. Which means that these days I am making more and more storyboards for things because I just enjoy it. I find it really fun. Unfortunately for this one I couldn't really play around with the angles and things too much because it's an educational video and the last thing I wanted was for it to be too confusing. I kind of feel like for this I would stick to pretty front up angles; Long shots, mid shots and close ups. but from flat on because I feel like that helps you see the information in its entirety and avoids confusion. Rather than say doing the same things but having them from high 3/4 degree angles for arts sake is just going to needlessly obscure the information and you'll have to think a bit harder about what you're looking at. Which is not something you want in an educational video. It's detrimental to the cause. So here are my revised storyboards (after the new script):

So this above storyboard is the storyboard I took to my client meeting to have approved. I didn't want to treat Rob, Robert and Kelda like they were stupid but I also understand that not everyone understands storyboard layout and I tried to make it as simple as possible for them to understand. Do this one includes none of my decision making. It's the much more polished version of the storyboard. I also at this stage removed the transition scenes because we already covered that concept so they understood it which meant the next stage I really needed to think about it was the animatic stage. Also the text under the first box starts part way through to act as a queue for later on.

So I made this one by sort of frankensteining the storyboard I was working from myself which had a lot more notes for myself and things to think about and decision making. Because I know if I don't write down why I did that I'll try to change it and then I'll be second guess myself so I always write it down so I know.

So I can see I used a lot of arrows to show direction in the first part of this storyboard and then lots of written words for transitions in the second. That wasn't actually deliberate and is actually relatively annoying now I've noticed it... anyway as you can see a lot of my notes on these were on which direction stuff moves across the screen or which way the camera pans during. That's pretty much just to keep myself straight because I'm quite quickly coming to learn that I work the best with a few plates spinning because I can go away and think about other things for a while if I'm stuck or have been working on the same for a long time I can clear my mind of it for a bit. The downside of that is that sometimes the little things slip my mind so I'm getting used to writing them down for myself so that I don't remember halfway through the project and then have to face a tough decision about redoing it or letting it go.

To be honest I'm quite proud of this storyboard because I think a lot of it speaks for itself, which I reckon it should do. So I'm pretty happy with how my storyboarding skills are coming along. Compared to what I used to do. I think this last year has really allowed me to figure out each stage of the process' specific uses and work with them. I used to pin far to much on storyboarding and I don't do that now.

So in addition to having made a storyboard I made a couple of beat boards to take to my clients to they would understand how I was planning on making certain more complicated to explain scenes work. Plus this gave me the chance to work through some of those scenes and think about them ahead of making the animatic. Meaning I wasn't walking into those scenes too blind. 

I made three of them. Two that I really needed too help me further figure things out and one too polish some edges - I also made that one because it was an element my clients were excited about and I wanted to capitalise on it to keep my clients excited about the work.

Ok so this first beat board is that last one I mentioned there. 

Between the main storyboard and this one I tried moving the bodyguard off centre because that's a more appealing composition too look at. So I put him at around 3/8ths of the way across the page. I also thought this would let him swing into his next action a bit better but tbh honest once I drew it out, I wasn't quite convinced. 

So you can see me thinking about it above so I'm not going to explain it too much further because there's a lot to get to still. 

The next board is for a part of the script I had some trouble with storyboarding to begin with because of the many forms treatment could take. I went for something easy to understand in the end though because it's comparable to something I imagine lots of small children have already taken at one point in their lives and that's taking paracetamol. So I went with this pill.

You can see that it's different to the above storyboarding because again I didn't want the character right in the middle because it's not a particularly nice angle to view from. So again I moved the character to the left and had the action play across the whole of the screen. I feel like that flows a lot better than my original storyboard where all the action happened in straight lines in the centre of the screen which wasn't interesting at all!

And finally I boarded out the transition I was most excited about! I remember starting this and being a bit worried about how many transitions I was going to have to come up with and just praying that some kind of pattern or common sense would help me create them and it did. I started to see common elements in the shape being transformed and the one I was transforming into and a lot of the time I ran with those things. When I couldn't see something very easy or was stuck on a boring idea I enlisted Will's help getting the idea ball rolling. 

This was the first time I'd ever made myself beat boards and if I'm honest I still only slightly understand their use but with some work I think I'll get them. This one explains itself pretty well and I'm really pleased with it. You can see a lot of information in it. The cake falling and the candles getting bigger to accommodate the space before they continue to transform into the child and guardian we see at the bottom - who then throw a ball and it falls off screen.

All in all I think I did a pretty comprehensive stroyboarding job here. There's so many of them and I was constantly editing. So I'm pretty happy at this stage of the process.