How to storyboard without a template | Storyboarding tutorial tips

hi everyone i wanted to revisit storyboarding today because although we covered the basics in my last storyboarding video which you might have already watched there's an awful lot of advantages to taking the plunge to doing them online so in this video i'm going to show you how now the first thing i'd like to say is i've actually been sent a graphics tablet by gauman now they've not sponsored me to do this but they did send me this so i thought i'd use it for today's video and let you know what i think of it now you can use whatever software you like for this i'm using photoshop but basically anything that you can draw on you can use and the reason for that is my number one tip for today is don't use a template i know that's completely against what i said in the last video about kind of user template that kind of fits your need but i think the more confident the more advanced you get with your storyboarding the more you start to see them sometimes as quite confining so today we're going to try and do it without a template so i'm in photoshop and i'm just going to go to create new and i want a big workable area so i'm just going to create a an a4 page and here we go a completely blank document the reason for this is we can now start to draw our our scenes and then think about the framing later and actually it means your storyboard becomes very organic as long as it makes sense to you and the cinematographer that's all that matters so let's start off with our first actual frame i'm going to be making these up as i go but i want to show you a couple things as i go so for this first frame i just want to do a normal over-the-shoulder shot maybe in a conversation between a shot reverse shot as the director i know i wanted to be over the shoulder but i'm not necessarily sure how tight in i want it to be so this is why i like the idea of draw first frame later let me show you what i mean so just over on the side here i'm just going to slowly i'm using the pressure point of the pen really gently just to slowly just mark out kind of like where the the head and the shoulders might be kind of where they are sat and then just behind them again just very friendly i'm going to draw the person he's speaking to let's get a couple trees because obviously he's going to be in the park okay so there's my there's my scene how on earth am i going to frame it with my camera now this is one of the reasons i love the idea of working on a computer to do your storyboards so uh the first thing i'm going to do is make a box now to do this i am going to do it on a new layer so if i just add a new layer i'm just going to hold down the shift key and i'm just going to draw a box roughly where i want it to be so by holding the shift kit makes your lines absolutely straight i'm making it widescreen as close as i can doesn't matter if i kind of go over the lines ever so slightly there we go i've got my frame and the cool thing is now i can play around with it so let's move it around perhaps i want it to be slightly higher maybe i want to have my lead character in a slightly open frame or maybe a slightly closed frame almost show here that there's a little bit of intimidation this guy in center frame is actually putting a bit of pressure on the guy in the background it's amazing how framing can really change something you might even want to resize it to like pull in make it a little bit more of a a mid close-up over the shoulder so that gives you a good demonstration here of if you draw the scene then you can start thinking about framing and clean up the edges one of my favorite tips the other thing that's really good about this is where i've been working on layers i can now duplicate them so what i'm going to do at the moment is i'm just going to duplicate that frame that i just drew move it down a little bit and maybe that is also my second shot so for the first one we are at a mid-close-up but all the while we're very very slowly pulling out into a wide shot so now i can make my box a little bit bigger and it shows that we're just slowly pulling out and like i said in the last video don't be afraid to use text wherever you can so i'm just going to uh grab my pen again and show that we are doing a slow pull back with the camera i quite like that i think that's a really nice way of showing the camera movement as well as playing around with the framing okay my next tip is to look at how we actually show um more complicated movements such as pans and tilts and again another one of the reasons why i say get rid of the template is you can just draw it however you like so here's an example i want to draw a scene where we are following a character walking all the way down the street and then up as we walk watch him walk away so how we're going to show that for this scene i'm going to start off in its starting position so let's draw the character he's kind of in the distance hands in pockets and he's walking he's walking down this road as he walks towards us we're going to pan with him and so we're panning right so now right next to it i'm just going to show how he looks as he approaches and walks alongside us and it almost joins up so we've got all of these houses he's walking past kind of like this and again i'm showing that with an arrow and then as he walks past he's now walking away from us so we've got the opposite side of the street now and he's walking away now this is a really lovely way of showing the pan because you've almost got that full fluid movement almost like a comic book and as as the cinematographer i can certainly see how i want that movement to look and again just like i did before i'm now going to grab my pen hold down the shift key and almost show that framing across all of them so what looks like an incredibly wide angle shot is actually all three parts of the same shot and like i said before let's clarify what it is by just writing down pan right i love this because our storyboards are starting to look so organic and so natural and it's a really it's almost like a very sketchy way of like fleshing out your story it's starting to really come together now so one of the questions i get asked an awful lot by my students is if i'm doing a conversation scene and it's just shot reverse shot again and again and again do i need to draw all of those shots and that would be just like that would be a really really boring process so obviously my answer is absolutely not and this is how i get around doing shot reverse shots so first up we're just going to draw the two shots um the first one is character a and they just sat there sat at a desk maybe with some stuff behind okay so that's shot one we're talking to this character and when we have his line we're more than likely going to be on this shot when the other person replies we cut to them and we have bearing in mind 180 degree rules so they'll be kind of like facing this way now there's my reverse shot now how do i show this in framing uh let's go back to our framing tool and we're just going to draw around them now but the little trick that i do to show that this is a shot reverse shot so these shots are essentially connected is i just like to draw a little like a diagonal line so that's enough for me to realize that this is a repetitive shot it's not just chop one shot two it's gonna be going back and forth a b a b several times and to clarify i'm just gonna write beneath shot reverse shot and that can go on as many times as it needs to that's a long dialogue scene we might use those two shots 20 times but we show it by just drawing it once okay my next tip is specifically for people who really cannot draw and uh i i made an awful lot of reference to this back in my old video i really do believe that you can be a great storyboard artist without the ability to draw just drawing stick man just like uh showing the placement of things within the nissan scene so i'm going to demonstrate that for you now uh let's go again for a two shot but this time i'm not going to try and add any details they are literally just going to be stick characters so let's start off with character a fantastic and then we've got character two how do we differentiate between characters so my tip for this one is just use color and it doesn't even need to be a logical thing it might be a case of we're just going to assign some color to the headline so for forevermore the guy with the red head is character one let's call him billy and the guy with the blue head is character two now this is really really useful if you have numerous characters and you want to try and uh draft out your storyboard quite quickly or if you really just don't have any artistic ability use color it's a great way of differentiating between characters okay next up i want to talk about the editing symbols that we use to show how you go from shot one to shot two to shot three and this is almost going to be a cut but it might be a dissolve and a dip to black now i touched on this slightly in my last video but it's so important i think it's worth speaking about in a bit more detail when i am doing a storyboard i'm always thinking about the edit before i've even started shooting so i use the editing symbols that were traditionally used in final cut and i want to show you what those are now so to draw a straight up cut we're going to go two lines almost like an equals line and what that shows is literally one clip ending and the other one's starting so for example if i wanted to go from this panning shot to the shot reverse shot i could show that just by putting that down in between nice and simple and it takes seconds by doing it digitally by the way i could take some time to draw it really nicely and then just copy and paste it wherever i need it let's say it's a dissolve so this shot fades out as the other one comes in i would draw that one by just doing a cross like that and that tells me that as one clip is fading out the other clip is fading in in terms of its opacity if i'm going to do a dip to black i will just draw a v and i will fill that up with black in other words the clip fades out and we're left with darkness and then the next clip fades in and finally if it's going to be a dip to white it would be the other way round those three symbols over the course of an entire storyboard will save you a mountain of time rather than having to write cut two cut two cut two just do a little equal symbol and it does it does the job just as well my next tip is again about color but it's more about the storyboard artist um signaling something to the cinematographer that really needs to stand out so what i'm talking about here is the focal point let's go back to that um over the shoulder shot from the start of the video here i've got uh the back of one character i can see the back of the head and there's the character that's facing us more likely most likely our um our attention is going to be on their face but what if there's something in the background that's really meant to be the focal point what we can do in this case is just again use a color so in this case i'm using red and we can just indicate with a little box i'm going to do it quite vague just slightly there i'm going to draw a box around the gun and i'm just going to say to the side focal point now in terms of the cinematographer they might use lighting or some other kind of technique to make sure that amongst all of the other stuff in this shot our attention is going to be on the gun okay the next tip which is again one of the advantages of working digitally is to use google images or any other kind of stock website so that you can actually get a background done for you it saves you a mountain of time now in my scene i know that it takes place in a forest but rather than drawing that very very badly and make it look a little bit more authentic almost like a mood board i found a picture of a forest which i'd quite like to use and now i can just put my actors on top of that so switching to a white color here i'm just going to have my character and they're just in the foreground i'm going to fill them in ever so slightly and i'm just going to draw that they are walking off in this direction and i'm always a big fan of adding uh annotations to this so i can see that tim walks away and we can confirm that this is a long shot and we might want to add the fact that this is roughly three seconds so guys look how quickly i've put together this frame just by using a background that i found online and drawing on top of it a really great way of giving a sense of place in your storyboards and uh just drawing what you need on top of that so there you go guys those are a few extra tips just that you might want to try out if you're working digitally but whether you're working digitally or not i really encourage you to try out actually drawing your storyboards onto a blank piece of paper just get rid of the template and just see how much more freedom it gives you it's really really liberating i highly recommend it as always thank you very much for watching if you're new here and you're studying media or film i highly recommend you uh subscribe for the duration of your course because i post an awful lot of videos to do with the courses if you're looking for where to go next you might want to check out my previous storyboarding video if you've not seen that one already or if you're wanting to brush up on your camera shots and your various camera angles you might want to watch my video on camera shots which you can watch here thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Media Insider

Views: 68,481

Keywords: media studies, film studies, revision, analysis, gcse, a-level, culture studies, media

Id: F9SGNflNxE8

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021