What do these other… other shots look like?

Part 3 of the Storyboard Trilogy. So here’s where the storyboarding really fell off track, and by that, I mean stopped existing for a few reasons. The major one being I was really busy with preparing work for a lot of different classes over the break time in which we were supposed to be filming, so somehow I filed the storyboarding as less important and didn’t end up doing any for scene 2 or 4. Another reason for this was trying not to run into the issue I had both times with my storyboarding, which would be my unfamiliarity with the location, as once again I would be drawing up a plan for a space I hadn’t been able to really analyse before, so I knew I would have to just change the framing and positioning once I got there anyway.

What I opted to do instead, however, was once again take photos during the pre-filming preparation time, and cross reference with the scripted events that would happen, and just shoot based on what logically lined up.

This time, I decided against drawing up character placement, as there was no specific framing where I wanted to include anything very visual, just the fact that they were clearly in a different house was more important, in my mind, for this scene – so for that they could really be anywhere in the frame, just as long as this was the basic shot structure. Seeing the final film along with these images has me realise that this structure was actually followed pretty closely, which I’m somehow surprised with.

A reason for that may be that on this shoot I had to leave about forty-five minutes earlier due to a scheduling mix up with my plans on where I would be staying, so some of the scenes (such as the screaming girl and the reverse shot of the table discussion) were up to Joel to frame and shoot, although it is unlikely I would have done the shots very differently to what ended up in the final production.

To wrap up, I’ll quickly go into why I didn’t do any storyboarding for the final beach scene. Basically two reasons again, one, I knew a lot of it would be go-pro shots, so I wouldn’t be in control of the camera – therefore was not required to think too hard about how I would frame the shots, as I wouldn’t be making them anyway. The second reason being the ‘on land’ scenes were pretty much self-explanatory when reading the script, so once again there wouldn’t be that much I had to really consider when all we needed was a two-shot of the characters and a close up on the hands.

What do these other shots look like?

So after the incredibly long shoot that was the filming of the first scene, we had one day in between before filming Scene 3, so I left my run incredibly late and decided to draw up the storyboard for the third scene the morning of filming on my way over to Melbourne. As much as this sounds like an incredibly risky move, it actually worked out better than expected, save for an issue I had previously on Scene 1, which was my unfamiliarity with the location before arrival. Thankfully, it was also one of the shorter scenes.

It’s pretty visible in the drawing that I rushed this one, but to draw back to my issue with storyboarding, I find that a shot will look a lot different in my head and on the page than it will within the final film, so rather than spending time drawing a proper outline of a character and the exact space they would take up, I instead try to go for a general amount of space they would exist in within the frame. There are also a lot of annotations on the page specifically because for some reason I try and explain a visual medium through words, which is an interesting approach.

To go back into the location, on this storyboard I was a lot less accurate with what I believed the set was going to look like because I hadn’t actually seen the place before drawing up the framing. So when I actually arrived on set, I had to re-evaluate and re-frame a lot of what I had written down, because it wasn’t actually do-able with the space provided. Because of the time it would take to redraw a whole storyboard while waiting to begin filming, I improvised with the usage of my phone’s editing system.

The images provided are what I could salvage from the storyboard, and how I applied what was on the paper to the actual location, we lost some of the shots where I attempted to frame the characters in a really specific way, such as what is featured on the top row of the drawn storyboard above, but we were still able to pull off the shoot with what I had in the end.

(I’m getting a lot of mileage out of the storyboarding, so… continued in part 3.)

What do these shots look like?

So as the cinematographer, I had to stage and frame the scenes of the film, which obviously means creating a storyboard, which I have done before a few times on past media projects. Personally, it is something I’ve had less than favourable experiences with, mostly just in how long it takes to draw out every scene, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the process, but I did give it an attempt.

To be perfectly honest, I got really behind on storyboarding, except for the first scene (images provided + click to zoom), which was done a week before shooting and was by far the most detailed. However, there were some issues in what I had planned, for example, you could say a lot of it was rather ambitious for the resources and equipment we had, but I was aiming for what I had in mind when thinking of an intro to a heist movie. There was a fair amount of planning for long tracking shots on characters’ actions and movement, which when we got to the actual set, were found to be incredibly difficult due to exterior reasoning and crew set up. Being that one, we couldn’t use some of the areas I planned for usage via the storyboard, and two, the type of shots planned require a lot of rehearsal and crew expertise to be pulled off well, and they simply weren’t necessary enough to spend a whole lot of time on.

Speaking of the set, one of the main issues I encountered when planning to shoot this storyboard on the actual location, was the fact that I had not seen the house set up before drawing out the storyboard, therefore as I kind of touched on earlier, was surprised to see how a lot of what I had planned for either couldn’t take place in rooms we were allowed to use or was just not going to work within the space. Which is also kind of on me, because I drew up the storyboard without being especially familiar with the set, but I was able to receive footage of the location beforehand to kind of plan around the issues that may of arise, and in the end, we did manage to work a lot of the storyboard around the space provided.

(Continued in Part 2).

Story Development of Pool Concept

This post intends to outline the creative process of the group in regards to the storyline and the script of the proposed film.
Members of my group are Joel Harris, Willa Robinson and Jonah Elias.

How has the story of this film developed, and how will it continue to develop? I can’t answer that completely, as this idea has not been stewing in my head as long as it has for Joel, but in terms of the group’s dissection of the idea – it has both remained similar to the initial pitch and also undergone rather significant changes. 

Re-reading the original basic outline of the story, the structure is the part that has particularly stayed similar, as the first two sentences of the couple robbing houses, and transporting to the wrong house are still a major part of this story’s plot. But I can see via this, that the story has moved further away from the more comedic possibilities with the idea, and focused more on the drama surrounding the main two characters relationship. Although as I say this, I recall that the flagship idea has always to some extent been to focus on the drama around the relationship of the characters. The difference now may just be a change in genre perspective regarding how seriously we are supposed to view the drama between the two characters.

So far the script has gone through four iterations, beginning with Jonah working from the revised concept, Willa editing Jonah’s script, Joel editing Willa’s edit and as of now, the group re-editing Joel’s edit. Was that confusing enough? Anyway, although I am involved in some of the processes, I have decided against ‘really getting in there’ and having a go at an iteration of the script in an effort to, one, not get too attached to any ideas I might develop and, two, to lessen the workload overall, and focus more on my ‘Cinematography’ role in the group.
Each version of the script has had both upsides and downsides individually in terms of pacing, dialogue and character development, in a way that sort of infers the strengths of each group member in this project, but the most recent fourth edit feels promising, and may only require minor tweaking.