What's the story?

As I write this I've been hard at work on two different video projects.  One is getting a production company off the ground for a potential TV Series aiming for the national networks, and the other is an indie film project I started with some friends.  See? I've been busy.

I normally wouldn't put this stuff up here, but I felt it had much to do with my creative process as  I wrote the story, and shot, and attempted to act in the project.  So, here are storyboard shots from scene 5 to "Red Hawk Rising".

All these stills are somewhat in the right order.  I started with our source footage for the trailer which is also PreViz.  I then extracted the stills I felt conveyed the scene or cut best, and created a custom Action in photoshop for several different styles.

Every so often, the action would result in the posterization looking too washed out or too burned in, so I tweaked the action by deleting some steps and redoing them towards the end of the action list.

This allowed me to quickly just hit undo after I had applied the action to a new frame and quickly change some values and re-create the effect to fit the shot.

This hugging shot above I just loved.  However my source material was very dark and the initial action list had high-key threshold values that caused them to come out in complete silhouette.  Thanks to the custom action and proper order of actions in the list, I just hit the undo button once and was able to tweak the values to get this look you see above.  Much, much better!

I'm sure by now you're starting to see the picture for the sequence of events happening here, but just in case you haven't noticed;  He's about to propose to her.  Storyboarding is as much an art as any other field.  Trying to find a limited number of pictures to tell a story is much like a comic book or graphic novel.  How clearly can you convey action and how many frames do you need to do to make it clear what's happening?

Some of these storyboards you will notice convey the same shot from maybe a slightly different angle, as you can see below.  The main mugger with the 504 beanie for example we got several angles of footage for the same walking sequence when they confront the couple.

Multiple camera angles achieved with just one camera and little to no rehearsal led to getting A LOT of footage for source material.  However in the end we were satisfied with most of our shots.

When we shot our Trailer shots, we only had one camera for which to do multiple takes.  Now, we are not working with a budget.  This is a project that my friends and I are doing.  The end result isn't as big of a worry for us as going out and having fun with the experience.  However, we're serious about what we want to do, so the end result will depend on how much planning we put into our production.

I also tweaked the action to purposely leave out the posterization effect on certain sequences.  You'll see more that look different below.  I felt these needed to convey more of the details than you could see with the posterization effect on.  So instead, I left the effect off, and played with exposure levels on the water-coloring effects to get the detail to pop out.

I'm sure by now you can tell these feel templated and the whited out center of the image is getting old.  I noticed this too very quickly but there is a decision of quality vs time spent in play that I felt it didn't need that much attention.  Overall, the storyboard shots do well to convey the action while at the same time removing all of the fine detail that could distract from receiving the story.  The balance needs to be in conveying what matters most in the shot while hinting at other things like camera angles, locations, action, and color theory. 

Just above - as I mentioned earlier, certain shots needed to convey more detail, and in this hand shot you can see the posterization effect and washed out center-image needed to be removed to convey the emotion of the sequence.

Depending on how important during previz is to the production, Color theory may play an important role in conveying things like who's good and who's evil, or the particular visual style of a film.  When these things aren't as important to convey in the storyboarding (like these here) You don't have to worry so much about what colors people are wearing or clothing or what background information is in your scene.

Again, these are in a rough order.  The next step is to arrange them in the chronological order based on the treatment I had written.  The treatment is also going to be roughed out before previz is finished following critical discussion about the shots we obtain.