Forgiven Storyboards

Way back when, I was watching the making of one of my all time favorite flicks, Raiders of the Lost Ark. During this behind-the-scenes documentary I learned about storyboarding... the process of sketching out each shot individually before shooting the film. I later learned that Hitchcock, my favorite director, used storyboards heavily as well.

Since then I'm adamant about the use of them. As the saying goes, paper is cheap. So, anything you can put on paper before filming is much cheaper than trying to figure stuff out on the set, both in time and resources.

The process of storyboarding a movie can be a very long process. A simple written scene can translate, visually, into a rather large number of individual shots rather quickly.

For the DV feature The Box, it took two three-inch three ring binders to document the over 1200 shots sketched out by hand that were used to shoot the film.

With our short Christian film, Forgiven, so far I've storyboarded approximately 20 pages of the 30 page script and consisting of 248 individual shots. To illustrate (no pun intended) here's a shot sample of the script and some of the storyboards I've sketched out.

Here's the section of the script.


And here are some of the storyboards for that section.







I've given myself until the end of the month to finish storyboarding this short. That's not a lot of time.

One has to think of what you're trying to elicit, visually, and how best to present the shots in sequence to reach that emotion in the audience you are trying to achieve.

So, if the average continues, I'll need to finish over 100 shots for the remaining third of the screenplay in order to complete the storyboarding process in the next week.

Time to sharpen those pencils.