Planning

When planning our project, we used storyboards to help us create an image of what we wanted to achieve. These sheets of paper allowed us to sketch some initial ideas such as camera angles and scenarios that we could use in the final video. In total we drew over 30 drawings of suitable shots and what was happening. This allowed us to develop the narrative of the story as well as realise what would work in the video. It was important to do as many sketches as possible at this stage to keep an open mind to more ideas and to help us when actually filming the footage we needed. These drawings included specific close-ups and establishing shots that we decided to include.

After we gathered all these, we took photographs of each drawing so we could then upload the photos onto the iMacs, creating a photo animatic. This is a technique which allows you to view the drawings in to any particular order which helped us to arrange our scenes easier when editing our footage.

With these storyboard drawings in our posession we then took still photographs of the actual shot which the drawing referred to. For example, if the drawing was an over-the-shoulder shot then we would take the photograph of an over-the-shoulder shot. This allowed us to experiment with angles further giving us more of an idea to what our music video would look like. The photgraphs showed us the brief aspects on mise-en-scen in each scene and angle and simply gave us a better understanding of the whole project. Also the composition was a lot clearer when taking the photographs with the digital camera. This process narrowed our ideas, as the better shots caught our attention more than others.

Just like the storyboards, we uploaded the photographs onto the iMacs to create a still photo animatic. This gave us an excellent advantage when filming as we knew which angles worked well for our music videos and did not struggle to think of different shots as we already had them plotted out in these animatics. Obviously we were well aware that we could improvise further but this made our objective clearer and made the filming and construction stage easier.