Storyboarding Workshop

For our first workshop on the Level 3 Creative Media Course at Fareham College, we went through storyboarding. A process every filmmaker has to do before filming anything, it creates an understanding for everyone in the production to see what each shot will look like. We started the workshop by seeing different examples of storyboards and how different directors go by doing them. Some of the examples that we were shown were The Walking Dead, Skyfall, Breaking Bad, Toy Story, The Lords of the Rings, Psycho and many more. Each storyboard was different to the other which gave me a wide range of ideas and concepts. I really liked the Toy Story storyboarding video which showed the Storyboard Artist pitching a scene to the director, this video gave me a good understanding of how it would be done in the real world. Here is the video.

We then had a go at our own storyboards. We were first told to draw someone getting out of bed which was a struggle as suck at drawing. And then we went through lots of different drawing techniques which was supposed to enhance our drawing skills... but it didn't. After every drawing technique we went through, Lee made us draw someone getting out of bed again. We would then use the skills we just learned to draw it. The reason for this was that you are supposed to see an improvement in your drawings, but there was very little improvement. One drawing technique we went through was the Marvel way. This was the way Stan Lee drew his comics and it changed how comic book artists and storyboard artists drew people forever. I really liked this way of drawing for storyboarding as it is very rough but it still makes it look half decent. I would really like to improve this way of drawing so over the next few weeks I will keep practicing in my sketchbook and I'll post some of my best drawings on here.

For my independent research, we have looked at some Western storyboards for influence for our 90 second western short film. One that caught my eye was a scene from No Country for Old Men (2007), the first shot in the storyboard really inspired me to use a shot similar as our establishing shot. I think it's great way to introduce a mysterious character like Lucas. The second shot is also really good for introducing a character, I think in our film we will do a shot similar to reveal the face of Lucas. We could use the same shot to reveal the villain of the film, Santiago. My idea is we have Lucas walk towards the camera revealing his face. He then opens a wanted poster. The camera goes to an over the shoulder shot revealing the face on the poster, Santiago.

Overall, I kind of enjoyed this workshop. I enjoyed learning about and researching storyboards but I didn't enjoy drawing storyboards. As my desired role of director, I have to create the storyboards so to get better I'm going to practise drawing.