Story Boarding your video OR stills project

Since the Manfrotto school of Excellence Webinar 'Still in Motion' I have received a few requests to talk about storyboarding

As it says Wikipedia says 'Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence


Interestingly it also says that Disney came up with the idea in its current form in the 1930's

Well here goes, but before any of you out there think this is all about moving images think again

Storyboarding in my opinion is just a fancy expression for putting your ideas down on paper as part of the creative process, which importantly helps you not to take lots of shots you DON'T need while missing the ones you DO

I first began storyboarding some 3 years ago for my 'Bridge of Doom' project

I wanted to tell the story of how the intrepid spy lands in enemy territory on a secret mission to recover a map but was struggling to come up with just how the story would work in pictures

That is when I stumbled upon the storyboard template in Apple's Pages software, part of the iWork suite

It is in essence just a simple template which you drag and drop content, such as images, onto the template and there you go, just add notes such as props lighting etc

It looks so professional too, which DOES count when you are sharing your ideas and concepts with others

Here is an early draft of the storyboard which went on to change quite a bit but you get the idea

And this is how it worked out

Without a storyboard I would have struggled for a sequence of events

So fast forward to the present and when I started to get into moving images I discovered that storyboarding was even more important

Here is a screen grab of the 'Resplect' storyboard, which was drawn by Katherine Holley.

It served its purpose but imagine how it would have looked in Apples 'Pages' template

And look how closely the end product looked compared to the sketches in the storyboard

You can take it further by hiring a pro artist, or better still a friend who really CAN draw, and then importing their work into the great free (in basic form) Google app 'SketchUp'

It allows you to plan in a 3D every camera and light position

Impressive but a little beyond me at the moment

You can spend a long time preparing storyboards and believe me it is time well worth spending, just watch your ideas evolve, change and blossom