Storyboarding is a way of planning out a shot before it's filmed/ animated to give everyone working on it a better idea of the overall layout. Say if you had a scene, but you weren't sure how things were going to pan out, it'd be a waste of time and money to make it without a plan. A way to cut expenses is to plan things out on a storyboard.
As an introduction to storyboarding, we were tasked with taking two cuts from an action scene from any movie and storyboarding it. Of course, storyboarding is done the other way around, but it's a great way for me to get the idea of doing it.
I chose the movie 'Mary and the Witch's Flower' by Studio Ponoc. Although it's an animated film, there are a lot of fast-paced action scenes that definitely required a lot of planning. Because I found examples of storyboarding from the film, I decided to experiment with shading and bringing light into my storyboard. If this was an animation piece, then this would be helpful to hand over to animators.
This is the story board I created. It's from two very fast cuts from the first minute of the movie, but it was an interesting project to wrap my brain around. I made sure to mention any important details and mention what was going on in each panel. I defined the shading in indigo, the embers and fire in red, orange and yellow. There was blue fire in the background, so I used blue, turquoise and green to set it apart from the other fire.
This is the first cut. There is more red in this one, as there is a blazing fire just out of shot. The further the character moves and the more camera pans, the darker the lighting becomes. There are also people rushing around on the deck above where the character is sneaking, but their movements are incredibly fast, so it would've added an extra page of panels if I'd attempted it.
This is the second cut. This one was harder for me than the first one, as the actual clip of the rock falling is incredibly quick, and easy to miss if you look away. Because of this, It was hard to get a progression of how things fell, so I wasn't sure how it was going to look at the end. However, I surprised myself and its very clear what's happening.
Overall, I had fun with this project, and look forward to storyboarding again. I found it hard to try and convey movement through the panels, as all the movement I chose was very rapid. I also found it hard to find a good way to convey movement, as I also used arrows to show a pan. The next time I create a storyboard, I'll be sure to think of new ways to make everything uniquely labelled.
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