Nope. Never. ;)
But then, I’m not a narrative filmmaker. The only thing I’ve done close to that is Letters.
I forgot to add in addition to the question I have given, do you also scout your locations and does this, in turn, influence your storyboarding for example or does the storyboarding that you do determine the locations for you?
most of the time
I tried to for a while thinking it would’ve made things easier but it didn’t. I first come up with the idea for a scene. I seek the location that best suits the scene and once I decide to shoot I let the conditions I that location on that specific day determine how I block the scene and how much coverage I decide to shoot.
Sometimes I take pictures. I can’t draw for shit, and I always have to see the location before I can make any decisions.
Courteous comment about the way different productions have different needs and different filmmakers have different styles, and then on to personal
I don’t start filming until I have a shot list. I have found that literally going down a list of how to build the movie really streamlines the shooting process. It can be adjusted on-set — it’s not fixed in stone — but it’s so amazingly valuable on helping me get correct coverage and know how much I have to shoot (in your head, you see the scene coming off as a series of shots that you estimate to be about a half dozen. When you actually break those shots down onto paper and observe the results, you usually end up with two or three dozen) and helps me organize the shoot more efficiently. I am still not good at doing storyboards but I’m starting to impliment them more and more, they really help you make sure those shots “look right” in addition to writing down their technical continuity. The key, however, is coverage. You don’t just say, “In this shot, he says the beginning of the line, and in this shot, the end of it.” You have to record ‘him’ saying the full line in both shots with lead ins and lead outs, or else it won’t cut together.
I shoot for editing.
—PolarisDiB
HAL 9000
I thought this would be an interesting topic to bring up since the topic of how people write their scripts was brought up. So, do you storyboard, do you pre-viz or do you improvise? Or do you combine two or more of these? I haven’t really thought of storyboarding yet myself, because I have never really made a short or a feature yet. I would be interested in what people would have to say. Looking forward to your comments.