Storyboard First Draft

I was assigned the role of storyboard artist and grip, and so once the first draft of the script had been written, I began to plan the storyboard. 

Initially, there was no script but I knew I was going to be storyboarding and so I did a few practice drawings to show the assistant director the sort of style of drawing I had in mind, as while I knew I had okay drawing capabilities I had never done a storyboard before and was unsure how detailed to go or what sort of framing to use. 

At first I played around with using a light source and using different angles, just as it had been a while since I'd drawn anything that wasn't just doodling and needed to be a relatively accurate representation of what was supposed to be onscreen. I am also not that familiar with drawing on photoshop and so I was experimenting with different opacities and brush styles and sizes to see what gave the best effect for the work. I knew also that I was going to have to draw quite a lot of frames and so I'd have to draw them so that they didn't take up too much time but also looked detailed enough to give an accurate picture of what was taking place at that particular time in the film.

Once the first draft of the script had been written I began my first draft of the storyboard. At this point we didn't have a shot list so I was going on what we had discussed in our group meetings, but of course although the camera team and director described what they had in mind, I could only draw what I imagined they meant and couldn't read their minds. 

I began with a very rough outline of a storyboard as I wasn't at this point very familiar with what they were supposed to look like. 

I also made sure that I numbered each frame so that I could keep track of the order, and made sure I was adding the drawings into the right place.

Each drawing I did on a full size photoshop document so that I could get more detail in the drawings, and them added them to a general template I had made earlier. Once I had done that, I wrote some notes on each one to describe what was supposed to be happening in each frame.

To tell apart the Id and the Superego, I coloured the Id in black and kept the Superego in white, to show the darker side to the instinctual nature of the Id and as they were supposed to be reflections of one another, this helped me to tell apart which one I was drawing and also to the rest of the crew when I showed them. For the draft a lot of the angles weren't very accurate, it was more of just a visual representation of what the script was telling.

I knew that I was going to have to do more frames, and also re do some of my drawings as the script developed and the shot list changed, especially as this was a 5-10 minute film and I had only done 16 frames. But to do a more detailed storyboard I was going to need a shot list and the next draft of the script.