Storyboards & Strategy

When the new Digisite launched I knew I wanted to dedicate my blog here as an outlet to discuss and share what I do for any given project I happen to be assisting with at the time. With the recent release of The Statement of Randolph Carter, I decided it was time to detail a little bit of what my responsibilities were for the project, what I learned, how I overcame, and how this will apply to future projects. As the film credits will reveal, not only was I one of the Production Assistants, I also accepted the task of Storyboarding. As a PA, all I really did was assist in digging a hole and clearing a path through some woods so I figured it'd be best to focus this entry on the more interesting/unique of the two tasks.

I suppose the first point of order is describing how I fell into the role of the storyboard artist. We can chalk the primary reason up to my background as a visual artist, drawing and painting as my specialty with some dabbling in digital design. Furthermore, I guess it is safe to say that not many in the Tribe have as hefty of a background within these realms of creating so the task became mine through process of elimination. It really is that simple with us, truly. So with my role defined, I dove right in. Statement, surprisingly, is not my first attempt at storyboarding a Digitribe film. It is the first, however, finished film that actually depicts some of our storyboarding process we detailed roughly a year ago. Simply, it involved a round table discussion where I, with pencil and sketchbook in hand, transcribed the director's thoughts in a visual sense very loosely, as first attempts were never perfect. So after having basic stick figures and directional arrows for character and camera movements, we were ready for phase two - convert to digital format.

Ideally, I aim to redesign my loose sketches in a program called Google SketchUp, a very handy 3D modeling tool. The idea is to create a mini 3D "world" of each scene and simply rotate the model in various fashions to capture the desired shot we want on camera. This might sound complicated, and it is three-dimensionally speaking, but the ease of all this is that this process eliminates recreation. Take, for example, all the interrogation room scenes in Statement. The storyboard process went a little something like this:

Mock up a quick, minimal room with a table and chairs to outline what the interrogation room could look like. I picked this angle simply for scope but the benefit of creating this in 3D is that I can just rotate, pan, or zoom around the environment to capture exactly what the director is after on any given shot involving this room. Obviously, this is much easier than starting from scratch each time and replacing objects and characters. For examples sake, I'm selecting one of the earlier wide shots in the film:

Fortunately, SketchUp includes basic samples of various 3D components such as furniture and, more importantly, people. So a couple clicks later and we have two 3D character representations of Carter and the Detective at opposing ends of the table. I took the same exact environment from before and rotated around to capture the desired wide shot and voila! And to top things off, sometimes it is necessary to load up Photoshop and place in more detailed objects like a lightbulb, for example:

As you can see, the final shot is extremely accurate to the storyboard - success!

For me, the challenge of storyboarding is twofold. First, I'm still somewhat new at collaborating with a director in an attempt to clearly sketch and mock up the vision he desires for the film. Prior, I was really only versed in designing what I wanted to design, artistically, so there were many instances of patience testing and repeat visits to the drawing board. But as the talks between myself and the director got rolling a little more, I found the process to be more fluid than I anticipated. And now that I am technically three projects into storyboarding experience, what was once an obstacle is now truly part of the formula. However, there's always a new problem to overcome so now that you're up to speed in my storyboarding tale, I've decided to take you behind the scenes into recent events.

To mix things up a bit on the current project, we've opted to allow the director/writer to scribble out the loose sketches that I will then retranslate using the SketchUp/Photoshop combo. That saves me one step overall but, as it is with each project, the new challenge is to interpret someone else's non-traditional sketches into a uniformed digital storyboard. Ah, but wait, now there are two demons to exorcise! SketchUp, for whatever reason, has decided to go belly up a bit with this:

Suddenly, I cannot pull up 3D models from the interwebs anymore and have them automatically load into an environment. It's a hassle, yes, but instead of giving up I am moving on with a shake up on the ever-changing storyboarding formula. To make this story short, I'm basically falling back on Photoshop more and manually copying/pasting bits and pieces from various Google images to help iron out the sketch translations. It's not much more difficult than before but each panel takes a little more time to complete due mostly to my stubbornness about deciding on what to use.

Unfortunately, I think that is all I have for now. I don't think I'm exactly allowed to post up storyboards for a project still in development and I've been sworn by word of death that I cannot post scans of the sketches I am currently reporting to as references. Just know that when said project is in the can, expect to see a stronger role for the storyboards, both on the project and on my Digiblog.