Tutorial 5:Video Production Sessions Part II

Part of the preparation for going out and making our own videos involved first sitting down and storyboarding our idea. What's storyboarding? Well basically, each shot is planned as it will look and the shot is drawn into little boxes with a short written description on the side to give the cinematographer (or the camera-person) instructions about how the director sees the film in his head. The director is the boss, you see, but in many cases well-respected and talented cinematographers have much expertise to lend the director, for example, in order to achieve the look/mood/atmosphere the director wants but in a better/different way. That's his/her area of expertise after all.

Well our group weren't made up of award winning directors or cinematographers, just three enthusiastic girls keen for a bit of fun. So we got our idea and sat down to talk about how it would go. First we came up with the general idea, then narrowed it down to sequences or scenes. And when we were all agreeable we could come up with the individual shots. 

This was, and is, a lengthy tedious process, especially for non-artists like us. If you take even a 30 second bit of film, that would have quite a number of shots in it. Shots can be as short as a few seconds (24 or is it 25 frames to a second?) so there can many, many shots in the shortest of films. Ours, as it turned out, was just a *little* over 30 seconds. Ahem.

I think that taking the time to talk about and agree on what we wanted saved time "on location" (as it were) and having the shots figured out beforehand also saved time. Of course we were flexible and open to new bright flashes of inspiration when they occurred and we worked some of them in; some of our planned shots "worked" better than others. Flexibility is important and many things look or turn out different than in your head! But on the whole lacking a director with a Strong Artistic Vision, it was back to good old teamwork and planning beforehand. 

Because each shot may take a few takes to get the one that is just perfect, filming itself takes a lot, lot more time than it may appear to the untrained eye. Do not be fooled! A huge, huge amount of raw footage (called "rushes" because they were traditionally rushed to the film processing labs everyday) goes into what finally comes out as a 30-second clip, 5- minute short, or 2-hour-long feature film.