Storyboarding

    To create a great brief, it is very important to plan out your shot order, framing, and pacing, as this allows you to be more prepared and have an overall smoother filming process. This process is called storyboarding, and it is very crucial to create one when planning, as you need your shots to contribute to your brief's mood as well as character. A film that showcases how a good storyboard can create amazing outcomes for your film is David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

    Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me serves as an excellent example of what great storyboarding can do for you due to its highly controlled and intentional visual style. Countless scenes in this film contain lingering shot durations, and this is intentional in order to slowly build a heightened sense of emotional depth. Lynch purposefully decides to create a tense atmosphere with a psychological effect instead of a quick editing style to allow the audience to further connect with the film, and his technique works, rightfully so. This goes to show that proper storyboarding can do wonders for your film.

    One of the key takeaways I got from researching this film was the importance of shot purpose. The key to fully allowing the audience to take in the shot and connect with characters is to let a shot linger. If you want this effect, you must carefully plan your pacing, keeping it balanced, especially considering that I am limited to two minutes. If shots are kept too short, there is a chance that built-up emotion could be lost, but if shots are kept too long, the brief will feel unbalanced and give me less opportunites to build.

    I chose to blog about storyboarding because it is almost time to begin my rough drafts for my storyboard in preparation for filming. I plan on mapping the emotional progression of my brief and making sure that each shot I plan has a great contribution to my brief's atmosphere and how I introduce my characters. I also plan to use this storyboard as assistance in testing how many shots I can fit into my brief realistically, rather than rushing emotional pacing. Completing a storyboard will allow me to move into filming with a clear idea of how I want my film to turn out.