Storyboarding is something new for me and I wanted to share my experience of my first short film as the storyboard artist. It was something that wasn’t even on my radar initially but my husband is getting into film making so he asked me. I was like huh, that could be fun. Yes please!
Did I know anything about storyboarding? Nope. Well, not really anyway. I mean I did some for my children’s books but that's quite different from film. So I needed to do a bit of a crash course ASAP. I was working at a library at the time so I searched up the catalogue to see what we had. Not much as it turned out, so I got an interloan from another library. It was an older book but still a good book. It was called Professional Storyboarding: Rules of Thumb by Sergio Paez and Anson Jew. It was a great start. I have since brought a storyboarding course through Aaron Blaise’s website and that's been really helpful so far.
The short film in question is 5 minutes long and doesn’t have any dialogue. It was a good place to start for both of us. I started by thumbnailing it out. Once my husband was happy with that general direction I refined them further. It was tempting to add details that we really didn’t need so I really had to stop myself at the beginning! We just needed basic lighting, camera angles and positioning of the characters.There were also some limitations I had to keep in mind. One was the room we were filming in. It was quite small. The second was our equipment. We had a reasonable camera and some lights but nothing like was a professional crew would have. It was still a great start though! The storyboards therefore needed to take all this into consideration. I ended up with around 30 shots. It took around 2 weeks. I was happy with my progress and we had plenty of time before filming.
The filming day arrived and fortunately the weather was great. Most of the film is inside except at the end but still all that extra light was really helpful. Shooting the film took 6 hours for about 20 minutes of footage. This was pretty good. We only have one more tiny scene left for the end of the film.
The main bulk of the film has been edited down to the 5 minutes. Its looking pretty good. The colour grading looks nice too. Next is the soundtrack choice. Its probably going to be something classical as thats copyright free.
You might be wondering what is this film about? Well all I am going to say is that it is about a salesman. Any more and it will give it away!
What are we going to do with it once we are done? Well, we thought about hosting a screening time at my local library in their main big conference room. I will keep you posted in a future blog with more details.
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