Preliminary Exercise 6: Storyboarding, Camerawork- Shot Sizes, Camera Angles, Framing and Composition Day One

Introduction

When thinking of storyboarding, there are two quotes that come to mind, delivered by American actor and filmmaker, seen in countless movies such as “The Wolf of Wall-Street,” Martin Scorsese:

   © “These storyboards are not only the means of communication for what I imagine, but they are the point where I begin.”

   -“The storyboard for me is the way to visualize the entire movie in advance.” 

       Now, you may be wondering, what is a storyboard? A storyboard is defined by the online Oxford Dictionary as, “A sequence of drawings or other images, typically with some directions and dialogue, representing the shots planned for a film, television program.” Think of storyboarding as brainstorming for writing an essay or a new business idea. Similarly, storyboarding in the film industry is done with the intent of preparing for an upcoming movie by writing, planning, and visualizing camera shots, and to get a clearer idea of previously thought-out story ideas. According to, “barkingsquirrelmedia.com, Why Using Storyboards Are Important, the whole point of storyboarding a video is setting up a production plan. That involves every single shot needed (the shot list, basically), how they’ll be laid out and how the visuals are able to come together with the script. Planning your video coverage, or video storyboard, makes it easier to shoot.”

Working the Camera

       This step of film production, or the process of planning, arranging, shooting, and creating a film, is fundamental to filmmaking. Our production team is coming together to produce a film, but before we start, we created a storyboarded that mapped our ideas into sixteen shots of the camerawork we have been taught so far in our moviemaking research. The intention behind organizing and merging our ideas into camerawork techniques and drawings was to help us envision our story.

       For those who may be wondering, Camerawork is a blanket term that incorporates all camera shot techniques. These techniques are broken down into four categories such as shot size, camera angles, framing, and composition, which were the methods we applied to planning each shot shown below.

Sheet 1- Introduces the story's context, exposition (introduction) and rising action.

Sheet 2- The rising action is developed in these shots.

REFLECTION

        To sum up, our team’s objective in this activity was to research filmmaking techniques we learned about and noted in our media studies class and take advantage of the suggestions given to us to piece together the storyboard above as our final product. We are grateful to have been able to achieve our goal, which was to develop a film idea and plot our storyline in our beginning shots. We worked together as a team to ensure that our storyboard provided a coherent vision of what we had in mind for our film.

      Preliminary Exercise 5 helped us to have a general idea of our film, in which it our ideas in this activity gave a more defined and narrower understanding of what we will soon produce. Through taking notes in class, combined with further personal research it was simpler to do this task, which was a continuation of all the information we have retained in this media studies class so far.

 Day One- Creative Process

To explain, day one of planning our sheets above was majorly influenced by the different ideas we have previously pondered. Therefore, because we had an established purpose of the genre we would convey, I wrote a thorough plot of a story idea we could consider, and as a result of my teammates support, help, and agreement on the story, we decided to use that as our storyline.

Our production team of four girls: Peyton P, Marley B, Lexi M, and I worked as a team, which made this assignment much quicker, and easier to complete. 

For example, Peyton P and Marley B worked and shared ideas on the first sheet, Lexi M and Marley B worked on the second sheet, and I worked on the third and fourth sheet with the help of Peyton P for recommendation and innovative ideas.

The research and annotating of the skills mentioned in this assignment were all made possible with the assistance of the internet on our personal computers, phones, and computers from our school.

WORK CITED: 

-Oed.com. (2023). storyboard - Quick search results | Oxford English Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=storyboard.

-Anon, (2022). Why Using Storyboards Are Important | Barking Squirrel Media. [online] Available at: https://barkingsquirrelmedia.com/video-production-blog/what-to-know-about-why-using-storyboards-are-so-important/#:~:text=Storyboarding%20Helps%20Production%20Go%20Much%20Easier&text=That%20involves%20every%20single%20shot.