Planning for production - Film's Cool session 2 (Storyboard)

As I said last week, we had the privilege of being able to work with professional scriptwriter Jesse O'Mahoney, who's written scripts for successful television programs such as Sky 1's 'Dream Team', who gave us a tremendous amount of help in creating a idea for our film and without his contribution I feel we might not have advanced to such a stage in our planing right now.

However, we were once again blessed as this past week we not only had Jesse O'Mahoney back to help us, we also had professional scriptwriter/ producer Ben Harris and also the head of media and film studies at LaSwap Kate. They were here this week to give us some help on creating our storyboards and helping us transfer our synopsis into a storyboard, as well as giving us a oppurtunity to ask them questions at the end of the session.

Again my group worked closely with Jesse O'Mahoney who gave us some very important tips on what we should do before creating the actual storyboard. He said that although we already had the synopsis written out we should make sure we knew exactly what was going to be in the film like settings, props, portrayal of the killing scenes etc. As with that knowledge it will become much easier to then draw out the storyboard, He also stressed the importance on imputing Todorov's narrative, that we recently learned about, into our trailer as it will give a nice structure that audiences can recognize to our trailer. These are all tips that we though deeply about and made sure we imputed in to our work when creating our storyboard the day after. So not only did this help with the creation of the storyboard, it also helped us gain a further grasp on what our film is actually about, and what specific details we are planning to include in it.

Q&A WITH BEN HARRIS AND JESSE O'MAHONEY by Film's Cool

Afterwards, towards the end of the session we were lucky enough to have a Q&A session with Jesse O'Mahoney and Ben Harris who answered any queries we had about how we are going to go about our work, and also about the film industry itself. This was beneficial in allowing us gain more of a insight into the film industry, as well as helping with the advancement of our work.

Prelim Task 2: Evaluation

Compared to my first film of 'The Meeting' I feel that my second film of 'The Meeting' was a great success as I feel that we as a group were successfully able to recognize our mistakes from out previous effort and then implement changes to our second filming of 'The Meeting' to correct those mistakes. This highlights the importance of planning your scene in advance as this made the filming process a lot easier and quicker as we now knew exactly what we wanted and how we were going to do it. However our second effort could of been improved if each member of the group (including) myself remembered to bring all props and costume we were suppose to bring in as this meant we had to make last minute changes which of course was time consuming.
What was your responsibility in the filming process?
Acting, drawing half of the storyboard and writing up the new and improved script
What decisions did you have to make in this role?
How i could shorten the script whilst not taking too much out and still make it relevant to the task; how to work collectively to visualize what our scene would look like in order to storyboard and in what way I could improve my character to make him more believable.
How effectively did you carry out your responsibilities?
At first I felt as if I was doing too much and controlling what everyone was doing a bit too much, but after I realized this I felt I done very well with working with John to produce the storyboard and script, in the end only focusing on what I was suppose to be doing as agreed which produced good results.
How effectively did the team work cohesively?
At first I feel as if we wasn't really working as a team but as individuals within group, but we quickly addressed this and started working well together designating different roles to each other and working collectively on what we wanted the end product of our filming to be like and when filming as well.
What areas would you like to develop?
Use of editing skills as I feel although we used more than last time we were still very limited in the amount that we used and could of used much more.
What two areas you felt went well and consider one recommendation you would give yourself or the group to improve on this practice?

• Planning how and in what ways we would shoot the film
• Detail that went into characterizing our characters
• Stick completely to the plan to avoid having to make any last minute changes

Prelim Task 2: Organizing

Above and below is a example of some of
the costume we were suppose to use

It was the organizing of our scene where we met are first initial problems. This is mainly down to the fact that there was a big confusion over the day that we would actually be filming and the camera’s we would be using so a lot of what we where doing became slightly rushed on the day of filming even though we had planned more thoroughly than before. The biggest problem with this was that because we didn’t know if we were filming or not we didn’t have any of our costume with us, something which was vital for our characterization and this also meant that we had to change some aspects of our script. For example the detective now became a ‘wannabe gangster’. The next unforeseen problem which arose was that one of the places where we had planned to film our scene was already being used and was quite noisy which meant we had to spend time finding somewhere else to film which wasted valuable time. However once we overcame those initial problems everything else became much easier largely thanks to the fact we had done a lot of planning beforehand.  

Prelim Task 2: Planning

Bullet points of editing techniques
and camera angles/ shots we were
planning to use

For the planning it was essential that we prepared thoroughly for the filming process as this would only be for me and most of my groups second time ever actually filming something so planning was essential if we wanted to avoid making any minor amateur errors. To do this we first of all looked at the previous scene that we made and wrote down any errors that we made which were things like a lack of variety to the editing techniques and camera shots made and bad sound quality. We then chose to look over the brief again to make sure we had a clear understanding of what are task was and we also looked over some information on continuity editing so we had more knowledge on the different editing techniques available to us. To adjust our errors we first of all rewrote our script to ensure there was room to put in any new editing techniques, and then wrote down a bullet point list of all the editing techniques and camera shots/ angles that we were going to use and at what point we was going to use them so we had a clear idea and structure to how the scene was going to go. What we then realized was that structure was the exact thing that we were missing last time and this can go down mostly to the fact that we failed to do a storyboard of are scene, something which Mr. Rosen highlighted was one of the pivotal parts of film making. So to correct this I and John made sure we both did the storyboard with John doing the first half and me doing the second half whilst Laurence planned the costume and location of the scene. When finished the storyboard we felt we had done everything to ensure that our scene had a clear and effective structure to it which would then make the filming process a lot easier and simpler.


Below is the story board of events created by me and John.