Sorting through a drawer of old stuff the other day, I found a notebook from my GDS days and inside it, a storyboard for a film that was never made.
I can’t remember what it was supposed to be made for, or what happened to it. I suspect maybe it morphed into a completely different film. The “HM Government” bit at the end suggests that this was something intended for use by Cabinet Office, rather than just by GDS.
Storyboards aren’t necessary for all short films, especially not films that are made out of interview footage. But this was different - this was the sort of film that’s made entirely out of animation and images and graphics and text. That’s when a storyboard makes sense, and is easy to create.
(You can click each picture to see larger version.)
The beauty of storyboarding with stickies is that you can edit your film very easily - more easily than if you’re drawing the storyboard on a single sheet of paper. Stickies make it easier to literally move ideas around, change the narrative structure, and prioritise what should come first.
You don’t have to be an amazing artist either (which, as you can see from the pictures above, I am most certainly not). Stick people, arrows, blobs and squares are probably all you need for most things. If you’re finding it hard to draw more complicated ideas, maybe the film itself is becoming more complicated, and needs a bit of simplifying.
And if, after spending some time writing a storyboard like this, you decide not to make that film - well, all you’ve not wasted much time, have you?
Filed under: work
(22 October 2018)