Storyboards Galore! Creating the Cinematic World of Pillars and Gilly
- Feb 2, 2020
- 7 min read
One of the most important tasks that come with the profession of a Director of Photography is the successful creation of a believable cinematic world for the viewer into which they can immerse themselves fully, especially on an emotional level.
The fact that cinematography has this profound effect on the elicitation of emotions was already topic of my dissertation that I wrote during the course of this academic year, called ‘The Structure of Sympathy. Cinematography in the Context of Emotional Contagion.’
In this, I was able to provide a scientific link between the successful emotional immersion of the audience and the creation of a cinematic world that most importantly hinges on elements such as consistency, visual symbolism, as well as the successful application of cinematic devices.
Storyboards – Creating a Cinematic World
If the created cinematic world is convincing enough, the audience can much easily immerse itself into the film and – more importantly – emotionally react to it, which is the ultimate goal in filmmaking (at least to my humble mind).
And one very vital task for the DoP in order to ensure that the cinematic world is actually coming together as nicely as envisioned by our feeble minds is the creation of a storyboard.
My Previous Research on Storyboards
Now, I’m aware that I’ve already researched plenty about storyboard creation in my previous years. As such, I’ve authored my blog entries called ‘Test Footage, Location Scouting, and Storyboards’ (2018) and ‘The Stages of Creating a Joint Storyboard’ (2019) in order to document my learning and research, but also my improvement with the creation and application of storyboards. An introductory note I have written in last year’s blog entry thus ran as this:
”A storyboard is usually created by the director, and/or the storyboard artist (if they are on a bigger budget). However, also cinematographers and production designers can pitch in on the creation of a storyboard, as they might have additional ideas (or restrictions) to contribute to the story itself. A storyboard not only reflects the characters, location, composition and framing of each shot, but also informs about the lighting (shadows), camera angles, and even the depth of field.”
In addition to this, I conducted further research: Within this research, I was furthermore able to provide links to very helpful tutorials that summarised the main elements of storyboarding in order to visualise the visions and communicate them to a wider crew:
And furthermore:
Lastly, I summarised my previous learning of the most important aspects of storyboarding, which I will now, for reasons of brevity, summarise again in this little list as a quick recap:
Choose/or create a storyboard template with panels that represent the relevant aspect ratio of your project.
Give each shot an identifiable shot number.
Indicate character or object movement by placing arrows WITHIN the frame.
Indicate camera movement by placing arrows OUTSIDE the frame or AT THE BORDERS.
a) For pans, place arrows LEFT/RIGHT of the frame.
b) For tilts, place arrows AT THE TOP/BOTTOM of the frame.
c) For zooms, place arrows AT ALL FOUR CORNERS of the frame.
Once ordered, subsequently number or letter your sequences to help identify them later on.
Add a frame within a frame to indicate the beginning and end frame of a moving shot.
With these aspects in mind, my repertoire grew and I was able to expand my knowledge and application of storyboards despite me being a horrible storyboard artist. As such, I moved on from this storyboard in LVL4:
I Wish I Was You (2018)
To this storyboard in LVL5:
Poppie’s Café for Monsters (2019)
Update: My Current Research on Storyboards
Now… Having already researched plenty on the subject in previous years and implemented them in my storyboards, I thus now conducted my most recent research by rereading my old blog entries and revisiting some of the sources I used back then. I then ventured online to see whether I could find any new resources or pieces of information on that matter. And I was indeed able to find this video:
Here, some more benefits of a storyboard have been listed, one of which was the fact that it helps the actors to better visualise the story themselves. This implication got me thinking and I realised that this might add more additional value for our production of Pillars of Creation especially – namely in regard to the heaviness of our visual effects that we storyboarded, and which we need to communicate to our editor Chloe.
With that new knowledge at the back of my mind – and since I am not much of a fan of reinventing the wheel but still am the DoP of two 27-page strong and really ambitious scripts – I figured that getting myself into the ring of storyboard drawing again would be more beneficial now than any more theoretical research.
My Application: First Draft Storyboards
As such, allow me to introduce you to the first five pages of my first drafts of the storyboards for The Tragic Case of Gilly O’Connor and The Pillars of Creation. I would have loved to upload more, but the latest upload restrictions on WIX keep me from doing so:
The Tragic Case of Gilly O’Connor (2020)
Although I am aware that the storyboard seems to be quite static, I wanted to keep the camera movements limited to certain key scenes. With the cinematic style I aimed to implement for ‘Gilly’, camera movement is mainly motivated to underline the void scenes, POV shots of the demon as well as dramatic reveals. In short, anything surrounding the demon. I wanted to contrast this with the stillness of Gilly, who is literally trapped in the demons world.
The Pillars of Creation (2020)
With the cinematic style I aimed to implement for ‘Pillars’ and compared to ‘Gilly’, I have incorporated much more moving shots. Since the genre of Sci-Fi is usually teeming with moving shots, I figured this might be the more genre-appropriate approach. However, in order to marry that up with the restricted amount of space, I decided to keep the camera movements subtle and instead heighten the intensity and amount of camera movements in the relevant action scenes.
Both storyboards were conceived during the Christmas break and took a total of 64 hours to draw up – for the first draft. But I would not know how time-consuming this endeavour would still become after that.
Some Storyboard Specs and Problems Arising
Specs
With two massive scripts and a lot of time poured into the storyboards, it was obvious from the beginning that the storyboards would be equally wieldy and that overshooting is a probable issue to run into. Now, as you can see from my first drafts of both storyboards, there are lots of shots to cover: Coincidentally, both storyboards ended up containing exactly 570 panels.
Problem 1: Overshooting
Whilst this is not to be confused with actual shot numbers, as I have repeated some of the same shots several times across the storyboard, especially with ‘Pillars of Creation’, this is still a massive amount to cover within the time given to us. Especially ‘The Tragic Case of Gilly O’Connor’ will definitely run into a problem of overshooting. Ideally, I would love to have not more than a max. of 20 to 25 different shots per day on principal photography in order to ensure a better quality of the shots obtained.
Problem 2 and 3: Space and Time Requirements
Furthermore, Pillars of Creation could very likely encounter issues in regard to available space and time, which required me from the beginning to think up good shots that would fit the space but not be too repetitive in perspective and framing and still make it work within the set itself.
Problem 4: Creative Differences in Vision
Since two filmmakers reading a script will always come up with two different visions of ‘their’ final film, we need to minimise the risk of surprises when going into production. This meant, that both the directors and I would need to sit down and discuss our mutual visions in detail to ensure that everyone knows what is going to happen in production.
My Solutions – Scheduling for Storyboard Meetings
In order to alleviate our issues, and in the two weeks after Christmas break and before interim, I would repeatedly sit down with my directors Has and Lynley to discuss our individual storyboards and merge them into a second draft (in the case of Gilly) and a final draft (in the case of Pillars). Over interim week, I then annotated and retraced my first draft for a better read after digitalisation of the storyboards, which took me additional 30 hours.
Whilst Has and I didn’t finish before interim and had to pick up discussions for the last three of the 17 scenes in total after interim week, we finally managed to finish our final storyboard draft last Tuesday – with a total of 25 hours put into it.
And as much as I would love to include the second storyboard drafts for both "The Tragic Case of Gilly O'Connor" and "The Pillars of Creation" in this blog, I will have to relegate my avid readers to my hand-in documentation at the end of the module. This is due to the fact that Wix-blogs tend to struggle tremendously with photo galleries that are larger than 30 images and with multiple photo galleries in one blog, leading the blogs to crash whilst either editing or loading. As such, please bear with me until hand-in!
Last Notes and Further Tasks
Even though we’re currently looking at even more shots with the incorporated shots of Has and Lynley, with Pillars of Creation, we made sure that this would not be a matter of overshooting. This is not yet the fact for Lynley’s script, as we will be running our joint storyboard past Hannah as our camera op to have a fresh set of eyes looking at it and downsize it as much as possible on this Monday. This should help us to find out which shots to keep, which to get rid off and which to merge.
For now, I’m happy to have gotten that far in the process.
References:
Tomorrows Filmmakers. (2016) Storyboarding – Tomorrow’s Filmmakers. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-578C3gFepU&t=2s [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
Svea Hartle. (2019) The Stages of Creating a Joint Storyboard. [online] Available at: [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
Svea Hartle. (2018) Test Footage, Location Scouting, and Storyboards. [online] Available at: [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
Hartle, S. (2019) The Structure of Sympathy. Cinematography in the Context of Emotional Contagion. [BA Dissertation] The Northern School of Art.
Cinematography Database. (2017) Storyboarder - Best Free Storyboard Program 2017. [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAeCEpG0KX4&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=113&t=137s [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
Cristobal Olguin. (2016) How to Storyboard a Film - Basic Tips. [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPEdpsVwIIA&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=112&t=0s [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
Indy Mogul. (2013) Storyboarding For People Who Can't Draw (Like Me!): FRIDAY 101. [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux_Em1lVsjI&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=114&t=0s [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
RocketJump Film School. (2016) Intro to Storyboarding. [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsvhq28sOI&list=PLRG4t0YYtkIzejIqbZ-qKOLjQchEri9ev&index=115&t=0s [Accessed on 1 February 2020]
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