R & P Post 11: Our Timeline and Storyboard

Our timeline:

Our timeline gave us a
rough idea of timings.
(please click to enlarge)

In order to plan our sequence’s order and structure, we produced a timeline outlining how we would arrange our opening sequence. We drew up timings and broke the timeline up into 20-second blocks, as this allowed us to see if the planned action would roughly fit into the beginning, middle or end of the opening as opposed to squeezing ideas into the whole time frame. We then divided the timeline into three sections of dialogue, audio & video and for each track pencilled in what the characters would say, which music and sound effects we planned on using, and which action and visuals the audience would see.

Our storyboard: 

Having created our timeline, we created a storyboard which indicated our individual shot choices, camera & physical movements (via arrows of different thickness drawn on the Post-it notes) and also our running order. We used different-coloured Post-it notes as we felt this would be useful to signify different shot types and titles (pink for titles, green for close-ups, orange for mid shots and yellow for long shots). The Post-it notes also enabled us to easily adjust which position the shots were on the timeline if need be, for instance if we wanted to reorder certain shots or if a new shot was added between two existing ones.

above - Our storyboard helped us plan the rough order of individual shots
below - colour-coding the shots helped to differentiate their framing/purpose 

The storyboard will also act as a valuable prequel to our Animatic, which will help us to visualise our ideas noted on paper, though more likely than not the ideas will be tweaked and will not match exactly with what we have produced on our storyboard, as we already made various changes due to jumpy shots & other continuity issues.