Does anyone here use Storyboarding?

azharrison

azharrison

Active member
Just curious if any screenwriters here use storyboarding as a visual tool? I would like to learn to draw better so that I can sketch out some scenes floating around in my head.

Would it help or is it more of a distraction from the writing process?
 
If you're writing a script which you'll later be making (especially if you'll also be directing or DoPing), it can be a great preproduction tool, especially when you need to rewrite due to changes in actors, locations and other resources.

But for a spec script that someone else will make? - probably not worth it, the script needs to sell on the quality of its dialog and ideas. Sure, you may have worked out that a particular scene would look fabulous with particular camera shots, but the DoP and director will have their own ideas about how to film it, they're most unlikely to want to see any storyboards you've made. So that leaves you the writer as the sole 'audience' for the storyboards - if they honestly help you write a better script, then great, but I suspect you'll get sidetracked with storyboard details which won't actually help the script.

Oh, and don't worry about your artistic skills - I've seen great storyboards with just stick figures.
 
There was a period of quite a long time where I felt bad about the fact that as a director, I never storyboard much of anything. Everyone seems aboard that wagon like if you don't storyboard, you can't direct. I think that's truly a load of crap unless you're making Star Wars or something. First off, on our budgets, indie budgets, storyboarding is really pretty useless because so much changes at the last minute. Your best-laid plans are in the ditch when the location changes the day before or you have to face the camera another way because the production design isn't quite what you imagined in that room. I will sometimes do some basic overhead storyboarding of how I see a scene playing out, that helps me, but I don't generally show it to anyone unless they don't understand my blocking or what I'm trying to explain to them.

In general, though, all of the preparation in the world doesn't help you when things change at the last minute and you need to think on your feet. I think my lead actor put it really well when he said that basically, with a short film that has only a few days filming, it's like you set it up and let the pieces fall as they do, it's very controlled in some senses, but on an indie feature one thing changes and pretty soon so does everything else or at least a bunch of other things. You become more of a "front-line" director, thinking on your feet and reacting to changes as they come, and that ability to be flexible and adjust quickly is essential to success. I'll take my ability to see a scene on the go and re-imagine it for any location over someone else's storyboarding any day, because that storyboarding is only useful to a director of a higher budget feature where the pieces are fixed and if that's the case, I'll hire my own storyboard artist to work with me, so I still don't need to be able to storyboard.

At best, just do basic storyboarding when it comes to that, stick figures, overhead views where the camera is here, it faces this way, sees these people, here's setup 1, there's setup 2, etc. That can be helpful, but the biggest part of that is for yourself. It's all about thinking about it. I go over the scenes I'm shooting the next day and think about them in detail, so that I know what I want to see, and if it helps you to storyboard them, great, it does for me sometimes and it doesn't other times. But despite having a variety of these storyboards available in my Director's Bible on the last feature, I left that Director's Bible in the backpack about 95% of the time. I just didn't have the time to be consulting it and directing a movie, I had to know what I wanted without having to look at any notes, including for the actors. So in the end, everything I wrote down, all of the homework I did, was only like studying for a test -- I had to know it, without the advantage of the cliff's notes.
 
I don't use storyboards at all when I'm writing. Its later on when I need to communicate my vision to others and where signifcant money is concerned that I take advantage of their ability to communicate at a predominately visceral level.

For example, the project I'm working on at the moment has a number of complex visual effects shots. In order to help everyone understand what is wanted even while the budget is being refined, storyboards will serve as an intermediary step.
I'll be sitting down with a couple of vfx shops next month and the accuracy of the quotes has just as much to do with the quality and level of information that I can supply to them.
 
FrameForge 3D is a great tool for non-artists and actually lets you explore your shots before you're ever on set. You can also physically constrain the boards to match what you'll get based on camera placement, the type of camera, and the set of lenses you're going to use. So this means its optically accurate for layout. It can even show you how deep your DOF will be based on lighting aperture, focal length, etc.

The other nice thing about it is you can rough out the dimensions of the set in the app and know before you even arrive on set what shots you can get, what can and can't fit in the location (dolly tracks, etc).
 
I storyboard a lot of the time - pencil/paper though - I find planning certain things out really helps me while shooting - instead of trying to think of shots/angles/etc on-the-fly. printablepaper.net has a bunch of storyboard templates.
 
Thanks for the advice everyone. I am certainly NOT trying to storyboard an entire screenplay, but I have had a couple of scenes where drawing them on paper seems to help me stay oriented while writing (i.e. two aircraft in combat, it helps me to keep track of where each plane is in relation to the other).

So, basically a director will want his own vision and will employ his own storyboard team...

Thanks for the clarifications.
 
Google Sketchup - the free version, which is close enough to the Pro version for most anyone's purposes - is an outstanding tool for rapid, informative storyboarding.
 
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