My Storyboarding Experience!

Welcome back bloggers! In this post I will be talking about my experience with storyboarding, what I think about it, and showcasing a storyboard I did based off a scene from Breaking Bad!

                 Storyboarding is essentially writing and drawing out an entire scene prior to filming. It is a way to give directors a chance to visualize how their story is progressing, as well as how to capture their ideas on the big screen. Storyboarding combines the inspiration from the mood board and ideas from the script to give directors a way to watch their movie before filming it, including the various sound effects, camera movements and shots, and mise-en-scene. Perhaps the best part of storyboarding is that you don't need to be a talented artist to make a functional storyboard. As long as your storyboard is able to clearly convey how a scene progresses and how it is shot, whether it be through illustrations or through marginal notes, it will be useful for getting the perfect shot once you begin filming. The only challenge then, it would seem, is figuring out how you want the scene to be shot, right? I thought so too, until I actually got started on recreating a storyboard for a Breaking Bad clip, and then I learned how challenging storyboarding really was firsthand.

Clip

                           Above is my attempt at a storyboard for this scene from Breaking Bad, where Walter White asks Jesse Pinkman to cook for the first time. When creating my storyboard, I opted for creating marginal notes to describe what happens in the scene since I knew my artistic abilities only went so far. Still, I tried to put as much detail into the illustrations themselves as I could, including where characters walked, shading in areas to show low-key lighting, and pointing out alternating shots to show dialogue. However, my abysmal artist skills could only take me so far, so I pointed out as much as I could in the marginal notes section. My scene was simple and didn't have too many different shots, so I was able to map the whole thing out within 6 boxes, although that meant I would have to specify each time alternating shots were used. In hindsight it would've been easier to use another storyboard paper to show each alternating shot, but there would've been little to say about them since they all have the same mise-en-scene elements. For a first attempt at a storyboard though, it didn't turn out all that bad, since I was able to describe the entire scene in good detail.