Story boarding

 

        Today we've reached the point of storyboarding for our project- Exciting!! We had a brainstorming session a couple classes ago and we came up with the basic plot for our story, but now we are laying a clearer path.

        We are dividing our planning into the scenes we've thought of so far (we will probably alter some aspects of these as time progresses), like a scene in a gas station bathroom, a funeral, and a car. According to these scenes, we are mapping which shots might look the best and which of them would help us tell the story most successfully. We are thinking more specifically of the order of our shots in a way that make sense and is engaging, and the planning is just helping us think about the details that will go into making our opening a little more specifically.

        For instance, since we want to have a shot of our main character dyeing her hair we had to come up with the logistics of this sequence because we recognize we can't realistically just dye our actors' hair. In order to make the fake bleach we plan to mix conditioner with either flour or starch to create a creamy and powdery consistency to make it look as realistic as possible, and then well use a wig to show her new, bleached hair, showcasing a contrast to her old look. Also, since we are planning on staging a funeral, we had to think of realistic ways we could do this, because we can't really have a real casket. We decided on using an urn instead and researched how funerals with urns usually look like in order to plan what well need for it.

  

        Our storyboard begins with an establishing shot of a gas station and then moves on to the gas station bathroom where our character will begin changing her appearance. We made sure to list a couple of shots and angles we want to try for each shot so when we are recording we have a sort of guide and then we can decide which one looks best. We decided to alternate the scenes in the gas station bathroom with scenes of a funeral with parallel editing in order to give the impression that both events are happening at the same time. This way we'll create the sense that they are correlated to each other. After the big reveal (close up on a picture of the main character at funeral) that the funeral is actually for the character we've been seeing change their appearance, we pan to cut to a scene where we see her in a car with her changed look and leaving this place behind, and with it a heart necklace she discards of, a statement piece we plan to incorporate throughout the opening as a sort of symbolism.

        Story boarding has definitely been an essential tool for success in the process of planning this project because it not only provides a map for recording but it also made us consider aspects of the production process that are essential to create a quality project but that not always come to mind if you don't plan ahead. In the next few posts i think ill be looking at fonts for the title and credits as well as the process of creating a script.