Digital Storyboarding

Digital Storyboarding

We began this project by choosing a scene from a film and storyboarding it. After this we got into groups and discussed each other's storyboards, eventually deciding on one storyboard to use for digital storyboarding.

The storyboard we chose is a scene from 'Matilda' where Matilda's father becomes angry at her and ends up throwing one of her books down a corridor. In order to develop our digital storyboard we looked at the props used in the storyboard and where it was set. For example in the second frame in our digital storyboard we saw that it was set in Matilda's bedroom where she is sitting by her bed with three piles of books laid out in front her. This told us that we needed to make a makeshift bed and find some books. Due to the fact that we had to take the photos for our digital storyboard in school, we were fairly limited with our resources. However we managed to recreate this scene as best as we could with what we had.

Another example of a shot that we had to re-create is the fifth shot in our digital storyboard. In this shot we saw that Matilda was speaking to her father whilst reading a book, telling us that we would have to make it look as though the person who was starring as Matilda was speaking and they would also have to have a book in their hands and pretend to be reading it. So this meant that we had to find a book and the person playing Matilda would have to pretend to talk by just holding their mouth open. Then for the next shot we saw that Mathilda's father was standing by her and looking displeased with her. However, in this shot you could also see part of Matilda's face in the left hand-side of the frame and on the right hand-side you could see Matilda's bedroom door open slightly. Therefore in order for us to re-create this shot we would need to have the same positioning as the original shot. One thing we did to try to make this shot as accurate to the real thing as possible was to have the door of the classroom open a little, and have the person starring as Mathilda situtated to the left of the frame. Then the camera person had to carefully position the camera in order to get the right shot.

Here is the original scene:

Furthermore to improve our accuracy was that we looked at what was going on in each frame in detail, such as by looking at the different characters' facial expressions. We also studied the different types of camera shots of each frame to try to get our digital storyboard as accurate as the original.

One thing that I learnt from this is that you really do not have to be good at drawing in order to create a storyboard. As long as you can understand what is happening in each part of the scene, and what shot you need, drawing skills do not matter. Also I learnt that storyboarding is very useful in cinematography and it does really help in the making of a film.