Preliminary Exercise 11: Camera Movement Storyboard

Introduction

American Philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who led the transcendentalist (philosophical, spiritual, and literary) movement in the mid-nineteenth century once said, “life is a journey, not a destination.” This was a mindset Ralph Emerson carried throughout his process of creating innovative poems, lectures, essays, and other art forms of his time. Furthermore, the main goal of this assignment is the emulate those words spoken by Ralph Emerson and use the previous knowledge our team has gained of camera movement (techniques of how cameras are controlled in film) to apply to visual representations of our storyboard that we have previously created. Without further ado, I will explain the process our group followed to complete this ask.

 The Creative Process

First, our group researched examples of camera movement from iconic production studios of our time, such as work produced by Marvel (the Avengers), Disney (live interpretations or cartoon animations), etc. Next, we referred to our original storyboard of sixteen frames which we have previously created to ensure we do not contradict or remove essential parts of our plot. Then, while simultaneously checking our previous blog posts of our story board, we drew the scenes from those blogs and added signals and lines in our drawings to represent movement, or sometimes camera lens movement. For images without lines indicating movement, we made sure to write the camera movement technique we intended to occur for those shots. Lastly, we included other elements of that contribute to camera movement in film to provide further explanations of our illustrations, along with action lines, shot size, camera angles, and framing. 

Doing this activity has only furthered our understanding of film arrangement, camera angles, framing, composition, and now including camera movement.

The videomaker.com website posted an article explaining, “Storyboarding: Methods, Techniques, and Lingo, by visualizing your shots with a storyboard, you can see how your shots fit together before you have shot a single foot of film or frame of video, which will prevent you from wasting both time and footage.” Having a vision of a storyline ahead of time can help producers to create a film much quicker, while also forming a complete idea of what they had in mind, which leaves less room for plot holes.

 Honorable Mentions (Our Team's Roles For This Activity)

Essential tools one can use to create a storyboard are pencils, crayons, a ruler (for a neat drawing), and a loose-leaf sheet of paper, and an electronic device for research and innovation, in which all the above were what our group used to sketch out storyboard in the image below.

By having access to all the resources stated above, each member of our team was able to fulfill their responsibilities which were: Peyton P illustrating the storyboard of the camera techniques we have learned, Lexi M and Marley B providing research of camera movements which work best for our genre and storyline, in which I was able to suggest prompts for our drawings, and annotating each shot with their respective action line, framing, camera angle, and shot size.

Designing a storyboard is important in film being as it is the foundational idea that producers use to piece their ideas for concepts they demonstrate in their film, while keeping their ideas organized and prepared for the day it will be referenced on set.

These are nine illustrated scenes from our original storyboard with camerawork and camera movement techniques applied to them.

REFLECTION

To sum up, our group had learned to take advantage of the knowledge of camera movement that we had been taught and personally researched on. The value of why camera movement is used, which is to guide the audience’s attention on a subject, while realizing that storyboards are a key component in developing the foundation of film. Moving forward, our group is eager to take the knowledge we have gained collaborating on this activity, and put it into use by filming scenes from our storyboard applying camera movement techniques to each one.

WORK CITED:

-Goodman, R. (2003). Transcendentalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [online] Stanford.edu. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/.

-Roberts, J. (2019). The Cameras and Lenses Behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe. [online] The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat. Available at: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/cameras-behind-marvel-cinematic-universe/.

-Disney Family (2020). Walt Disney Introduces the Multiplane Camera. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN-eCBAOw60.

-Videomaker (2020). Storyboarding: Methods, techniques and lingo. [online] Videomaker. Available at: https://www.videomaker.com/article/f2/15415-how-to-make-a-storyboard-storyboard-lingo-techniques/#:~:text=By%20visualizing%20your%20shots%20with [Accessed 5 Apr. 2024].