“I go inside their heads, try to understand what they are thinking, and put it on paper. I always try to make the drawings theirs, not mine…It’s like they’re making a movie in front of me. They tell me the shots. I do fast and loose drawings on a clipboard with a Sharpie pen—one to three drawings to a sheet of regular bond paper. I try to establish the scale, trap the angle, ID the character, get the action.”
J. Todd Anderson, on story boarding for Joel and Ethan Coen
Storyboard
Read it. Learn it. Do it.
The Man On The Train (2002), dir. Patrice Leconte. Not a story board, but a score by Pascal Estève enters the heads of Leconte's characters.
"People often ask me if I make storyboards. The idea appalls me! I look at it my own way, I speak for myself, but it's out of the question that I would make a storyboard for a film I make because the storyboard, while similar to a comic book, is in my view light years away from what you need to make a movie."
Patrice Leconte, director, May 27, 2007 Actua BD
You Did It Then: As Webb Smith did first at Disney, sequence these sketches into narrative storyboard order, following your intuition.
Story boarding interprets action. To story board, you draw the scene in its component stages. To story board with inspiration, you extricate your heart from thought.
After you allocate to each of the shots the time it requires, print them out and view them. Then adjust your sequence if necessary, add subtitles for dialogue, and adjust color. Using music, zooms and pans, create an animatic. Repeat the process (if you can) with live action stills, creating a photomatic. Step-by-step instructions and the files you’ll need are in the button on the left.
You Do It Now: Storyboard the scene for which you held the production meeting in the Chapter 10 (Studio) exercise.
