How to draw A-grade storyboards (even if you can't draw!) | Media studies tutorial

hi guys in this video I want to talk about how to do the best storyboards you can now I want to start off by dispelling two minutes one you need to be a great artist to be a great storyboarding I don't believe this at all and two there's a right and a wrong way to storyboard use storyboard however you need to in this video I'm going to show you two different ways of storyboarding but in both examples they would absolutely get an A grade so for those of you here for the quick answer I want to know what the golden rule is for a great storyboard it's simple a good storyboard is one that you can watch one that you can absolutely experience beyond just what the camera angle is and what happens what can you hear what's the lighting like it needs to have all of the details that you would need in the full film it's like Martin Scorsese said in this quote the storyboard for me is the way to visualize the entire movie in advance I had to think what he means by that before the expense of getting all of your crew and your equipment on set which could be so expensive it's a way of seeing every single shot with the music with the lighting and seeing what works what doesn't work Peter Jackson did this absolutely loads during the Lord of the Rings and even went to the extent of hiring voice actors so that he could watch the entire film in storyboard before he even pressed the record button so bear in mind you're all gonna have very different levels of artistic ability what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw this twice I'm gonna draw it once for people who have slightly more of a visual way of working and for people who genuinely believe they have no artistic ability I'm gonna do another version web unit would be relying more on text now these are two storyboards that I've made there are tons of templates online but I like these ones because it allows you to adapt it most of all to your style so here we're going to be putting most of the information in the frame here we're going to be making loads and loads of notes down the side now we need to have something in storyboard so what I want to do is do this back to front let's watch this clip from Jurassic Park and just have a think beyond just the camera and what happens what are the different elements that we're gonna have to translate from moving image into a two-dimensional print format what is it so let's take a look at how we would do this visually so in this one I'm going to try and draw with as much artistic ability as I can which isn't actually that that much I'm going to draw the whole scene including the movement of the camera okay so everything that we see when the frame starts and everything that we see when it finishes so down here there was the little girl there was the little boy we've got a couple of raptors here okay so here I've tried to draw the entire scene we need to include things like lighting in this so when you consider how we're going to show the fact that there's like an awful lot of shadows on the wall and very very low-key lighting if you've got the artistic confidence you can kind of literally just show where shadows will be so they're casting quite heavy shadows themselves the background is very very shadowy we almost got iris in kind of going around I'm not even worrying too much about where the frames are but I'm showing that again I want to make sure that's absolutely clear as to what the lighting is like so don't be afraid to write on the frame itself so we've got low-key lighting that focuses on the characters if there's anything on here that it's not entirely sure what it is like this kind of counter it's not entirely obvious I've done it very very sketchy just to show that you really don't need that artistic ability don't be afraid to label things we've got girl boy Raptors counter in other words make it absolutely clear to the person looking at your storyboard assuming it's not you what it is they're looking at it might make perfect sense to you but it's got to make sense in the context of this video to the person marking your work okay so the next thing that we said we wouldn't talk about was the way that the camera works now I've drawn this from the perspective that I want the character being but don't forget there was that camera movement it did that kind of dolly type crane thing that moved down as well so what you can also do is literally draw on the frame in this case how the camera moves so here the first frame started around about here and it ended with that kind of mid close-up of the Boyne the girl and what I'm going to do now is just show how that movement goes so you can see this one is all about the visuals we've now got our starting frame and how it actually pans down to our finishing frame obviously I've done this very sketch I've done it very scribbly I'm not trying to be at all impressive anything it is but it shows you one way that you can do things visually if you prefer to really picture things so let's stop where we are now and start thinking about how we would do this even more simply if you do not enjoy drawing or if you want to just stick to stickman because I insist that you can do this let's do these exact same camera movement now over here so I'm going to start off with the first shot but this time I'm going to have it separate so we've got something that resembles a raptor honestly I don't think anyone would call that a good drawing it's not entirely clear as to what it is so we should write down exactly what that means we can say here Raptors appear at the kitchen door I think in this case it's fairly obvious as to what we're looking at we could clarify that underneath if we wanted but here we're actually making things far more descriptive kitchen is very low-key lighting Raptors scream as they enter so much of what the pictures are doing for us here if if you can't draw any dinosaurs any better than this then you've got to rely more on this actual text work now what I've done with this one is actually include the action because again you might have an idea for your storyboard as to what's happening but it might not be entirely obvious to the person viewing it so again in both of them I will actually say give a very very brief description as to what happens in this scene so here I'm also going to put down Raptors enter boy and girl look scared okay now going back to this shot we have a continuation where it actually ends up on the second frame again I just want to prove that you do not need to be the artist we've got the girl and the boy looking scared to label them in fact if you've got colored you could use these to make associations as well so this character is always going to have an orange top or yellow top and this characters always going to have an orange top and so that's a way of distinguishing between shots now here I still need to show the camera movement where I've shown in one frame on this version here these actually belong to the same shot but they could very easily look like a separate edit so here I can put down shot 1a and here is shot one be showing it's a continuation of this presuming I go to a different shot here this would then become shot too so how do we tell the viewer how the camera moves from shot one a to shot one B we can just write it down again so we can say camera pans across to shot 1b so what I've done here is the exact same thing but again I think where this is more visual it involves perhaps slightly more artistic ability I insist you can just draw something that resembles what you want but as long as it has the correct composition as long as it shows how the camera moves you're still achieving the same effect okay so what other information are we going to need to include to ensure that we can absolutely see this just as clearly as if we were watching the clip sound is a big factor now again by the time your storyboarding you might have no idea what your finished soundtrack or sound effects are gonna sound like but you need to give the person an impression of what they can hear so I'm just gonna put in the background a little musical note to show that it's music and I'm going to describe it the best I can very low chilling cello music you could also include sound effects in this so I want to have the sound effect of the boy and the girl panting breathing and then of course we've got the sound effect of the raptors in the background here where i'm not actually like showing an awful lot visually i need to be even more descriptive so i'm going to write down what happens in this shot boy and girl look panicked camera finishes on mid shots now that's the important point you see me do it now with low-key lighting and with mid shot from the perspective of trying to get the best grade use that key terminology mid shot long shot close up high key lighting low key lighting diegetic sound voiceover the more of this kind of terminology you can you can show in your work the higher your chances are of nailing your storyboard so we've covered the fact that you need to include miss on scene whether it's drawn or described we've looked at how you need to share what the camera does in terms of its composition and its movements be it in one frame or two separate frames we also need to show how you would deal with editing whether one clip does a straight cut like it does 99% of cases or whether you want to have a dip to whites or a dip to black or a crossfade how do you do this again it's kind of it's up to you but the way I've always done it traditionally is to use the symbols that you get in old-school Final Cut Pro so for a for a straight cut I'll always put this at the side almost showing a clip ending and a clip starting if I was to show a crossfade between two clips I'd be tempted to draw a cross showing the transition between the two so I know between shot 1b and shot 2 we have a cross fade or of course there's other option you can just again you can just write it so on the side of shot 2 we can just write crossfade two shots two just like I said at the start of this video the important thing is that you show the information it doesn't really matter how you do it as long as it's clear to you and the person who's marking your work so what about other specific things that you might need to include such as depth of field focus well let's just have a think about how we could show that let's look at this shot let's assume that we wanted to have a focus pull from the background to the foreground how could we show that well first off we could describe it so we could actually say focus pull from background to foreground that would work absolutely fine if you wanted to you could show them as two separate shots so in the first one you could just draw a gray crosshatch over these guys and in the second shot change it so that the crosshatch was in the background and actually labeled that with whether focuses focus in the background or focus in the foreground either way you're making that absolutely clear I've shown with shadows how we could show an absence of lights but what if you had specific lighting from a natural source or something like this well you might want to show that actually on the frame so here I'd want the guys to be lit from above I can just draw what looks something like a lamp and show where the Lighting's coming from I could then right next to it spotlight from above you could describe it all like I did in one before just show light with shade now I'm hoping you're looking at these two examples and not thinking they are anything impressive I've tried my hardest to to show a lack of artistic ability but the one thing that I would say that we have in each of these examples is a very very clear picture of your intentions as a director the whole point of the storyboard is to consider what you will or won't need on the actual day of shooting before you start spending money so let's just have a quick recap of what you need for an awesome storyboard one show what you can in terms of the Meese on scene if you're able to draw it then do that's fantastic if you can't just draw the most essential placement of things with the description on the side the camerawork so this includes special instructions such as the focus the composition the way the camera moves show that however you need to whether it's literally drawing the starting and finishing point of the frame you can do the same thing for a zoom in so you could show it as zoomed out and then zoomed in or again just describe what the camera does and have it split over several different frames editing make it absolutely clear how you get from shot 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 and even though you're probably going to get sick of writing cut - cut - cut - which is in most cases you need to make that clear to the audience the other thing I didn't mention in terms of editing is shot duration how long does it take to get from here to here 5 seconds 6 seconds and so on and finally sound make sure that as we're watching it we know that there's a certain sound effect or a piece of music that happens as the character turns around that makes everything feel so much more watchable for want of a better word but what I've done with both of these videos guys is I've tried to show you you don't need to be an artist and there isn't a single way of doing things do what makes sense to you do what communicates your ideas the best as always thank you very much for watching if you're looking for something else to watch I'd highly recommend moving on to my tips for making a music video if that's what your storyboarding or if you're just getting into Media Studies you can watch my a to Z guide right here

Channel: The Media Insider

Views: 446,392

Rating: 4.9588137 out of 5

Keywords: filmmaking, movies, pre-production, frame, camerawork, sotryboard, story board

Id: NPrkxj2MyZI

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019