Story-telling | Story-boards and Trailers (19th October 2016)

Story-boards are very useful across productions to help to visualise how the action in a story unfolds before shooting and during post-production.  Today's lecture with Simon went through different types of story-boarding and how they can be used for different purposes.

Most story-boards concentrate on key frames; the key moments that tell the story.  Story-boards do not need to be diagrammatic or works of art, they simply need to act as a guideline across the production for how the story unfolds.

Story-boards can be used throughout the production process:

• Conception: to convey the concept without having to shoot any material.
• Pre-production: where story-boards are used most, to use as a basis for how to deliver the production.
• Production: to use as a guide to set up shots on the day.
• Post-production: to speed up the editing process by depicting the initial vision to the editor and director.

More modern productions which rely on heavy action may use pre-visuals, which can depict basic animations to give a very basic feel of how the production will look.

Later on, we also looked at trailers, which act as the visual pitch for the story for the audience.  Trailers should aim to show what the story is (but not the plot), when it will be screened, and who it is aimed at.

We also each created a trailer for SOFT, by Simon Ellis, which we looked at a few weeks ago:

I chose to create a tense feeling in my trailer by constantly switching between the father, son and the mobile footage of the gang.  I felt this also worked to create parallels between the father's attack and the son's attack, and also allows for the audience to see a contrast between the two about whether or not to fight, which is the focal point of the film itself.

I ended the trailer with the line "Dad... Are you scared?" as I feel this is the most important theme of the film - whether or not the father has the courage to defend his home and son.