A zip file containing templates for your storyboards can be found here.
In the last tutorial, we touched briefly on indicating a moving camera with static frames. We’ll expand on that some more now, as we enter the guts of our action sequence. Your goal, with any set of storyboards, but especially with action-oriented ones, is the covey the mood the director has in mind for that scene to everyone else in the crew. One look and the viewer should be swept up in whatever is going on and want to turn to the next page. If you accomplish this, then the movie is really half-way toward being something that people want to watch, because if these static images can be compelling, just imagine what the finished footage, based on them, will be like — that is, if everyone else does their job as well as you’ve done.
Arrows for Every Occasion
Arrows are an easy cheat for showing action and dynamic movement within the frame. It’s a luxury that you have with storyboards that you don’t have, for example, in a graphic novel or comic book. You can get away with it because the frames are intended to give direction to what will be the ultimate shot.
Below are some rough examples of bold and dynamic arrows that you can use within your frames, but you can draw direction and action anyway you want, as long as it fits in with what you’re trying to convey in your frames. If you can get away with drawing some action lines like in comic books, that’s great. I personally like to leave nothing to the imagination though. If a car is slamming into a brick wall, I want a huge arrow slamming into the brick wall too. I think it adds power and impact to what you’re doing.
Dynamic Figures are the Rest of the Equation
Good storyboards are all about being bold. There is no room for gentle movements or subtlety. You’ve got to grab the viewer in that one second they look at each frame so that the emotion that you and the director are trying to get across is clear and concise. It might be well and good for Mona Lisa to have an enigmatic expression that you could ponder for hours, but if your character is having their fingernails pulled out off-screen, that character had better look like they are in pain because if affects what everyone puts into the shot, from lighting to camera position and movement, all the way down the line.
The caveat to what I’ve just said, is of course, the clam dramatic film. If you’ve got people sitting around in rooms talking to each other, maybe stepping outside from time to time to think about what they’ve just said or heard or whatever, then a heroic figure being pushed toward the drawing room doors by a giant arrow is going to really feel out of place.
Moving On ...
So, we last left ASHLEY being pushed off the edge of the fire escape by CODY in a desperate attempt to save both their lives from the undead creeps what approach them from above and below.
I’ve continued forward, creating tension, as in the last tutorial, as ASHLEY now dangles on the edge of the fire escape. Getting her there, I’ve put in a moving camera frame (see below), indicated by a sort of fractured set of three frames following her movement. I’ve helped her through the air with some big 3D arrows, continuing on into the next frame, as she spins in mid-air, grabs a rung of the ladder and slams into it at the last second.
Having ASHLEY fly right toward the camera is dramatic and heroic; moving in close to her as she spins, then an insert shot of her grabbing the rung at the last second, then close again as she slams into the ladder make her larger-than-life, which fits in with the mood of this film. In terms of expression, which will be refined slightly as we get to the final drawings, I’ve gone way over the top: wide open mouth and eyes, there’s no mistaking that she’s feeling terror in the first frame and agony in the last frame.
Likewise with the expressions of both CODY and ASHLEY in the frames that follow this, as CODY shouts at ASHLEY, making her move down the ladder where she is grabbed and pulled down by the zombies waiting below.
A broad arrow helps move CODY to the front of the fire escape where he starts to climb down (1), and a sweeping, dotted arrow (2) helps show the suddenness with which ASHLEY is dragged down. Graduated, dotted arrows like this one help show a sudden movement, almost like a motion blur on the tail of the arrow. Smaller arrows on the frames in between show smaller movements and motions, like the sudden turn of a head, or the steady movement down as the characters make their way down the ladder.
As ASHLEY is dragged off the ladder and into the waiting crowd of zombies, we get really dramatic with the expressions, angles and arrows. Once again, we’ll refine the expressions and tone them down just a little bit when it comes time to do the final rendering, but for now it’s important to keep things as broad as possible.
Knowing the Action, But Not the Angle
For the last bit of this sequence, we have a bit of an action stunt, as CODY, who is now out of options, hurls himself off the ladder, into the zombie crowd to save ASHLEY, and to be honest, as pseudo-director of this sequence, I have no idea what camera location would be best to cover this. In some cases, like this, it’s a matter of just seeing “on the day”, what the stunt looks like, what the location looks like in relation to the large number of actors/extras on the ground.
I guess we could just skip this part and move on, but that’s going to make a bit of a hole in the shoot, not to mention the narrative of our ‘boards, so, thinking it through, the clearest way to cover the stunt — on paper — would be orthographically, from one side:
I’ve indicated CODY’s movement, I’ve shown what other variables we have in the scene (the fire escape, the building and the hoard of zombies) and, to be honest, this angle might work just fine, but since we’re unsure, it’s best to show it clearly, rather than definitively, from another angle that the director might not be happy with. For example, if we had drawn the camera inside the zombie crowd with CODY suddenly smashing through, it would see like we didn’t need to cover the complete leap from the fire escape (a big stunt) and someone might make the decision that just jumping into the crowd from a little step ladder would be okay (a small stunt). Re-jigging the stunt for a wide shot, on location, when the director suddenly decides that would be the best angle would pretty much throw that shooting day into chaos.
So, it’s best to go as wide as you can, covering all required elements for a shot like this. Sometimes it not even a bad idea, if specific camera angles are already laid out, to sketch out the whole stunt like this and have the additional angles as well, even if it means repeating the action over subsequent storyboarded frames. If it’s a complicated set-up, you can never have enough sketches to try and cover every contingency.
Next
Well, okay, we’ve got some thumbnails (nearly 100 intimidating frames ... maybe I shoulda picked a shorter scene) for our sequence. Next time, we’ll start rendering them in so they will not only be “readable” by people other than yourself, but also come as close as possible to replicating what will be seen through the lens on the actual shoot.
