Storyboards

Sometimes a director will work with an artist to pre-visualize the film in order to work out certain shots or scenes or in order to show the crew what he is looking for in a particular set up.  I spent a few marathon 12-hour nights with my storyboard artist and good friend Dan Hamilton a few weeks before leaving for India.  He does his best work from 2 pm to about 3 or 4 am so that is when we worked.  We would act out the scenes in his  office/house or on his desk with GI Joe figures.  Once we were in sync and Dan knew exactly what I was looking for then he would start drawing.  Normally I would watch over his shoulder and correct lines or angles etc and sometimes he would draw silly little pictures of me watching him draw instead of what he was supposed to be drawing.  

Here are a few of those “working boards.”  These boards were meant to be utilized on set and in fact, I did carry the originals with me in a binder while shooting.

The first board is labeled scene 61.  The only thing I am sure of is that this WAS NOT scene 61.  The draft of the script that we were working on had yet to be re-written when we were doing the boards.  The script changed considerably and often while shooting.  Money, time, locations, actor availability, etc...anyway, this board depicts a scene in the film where our lead character is asleep on a train and someone sneaks into his compartment.    The top and bottom panels are one continuous shot, while the middle set of shots are what are called inserts....shots that will be cut into the wider continuous shot. 

 
The second example is an even earlier board that show more layout of a scene than actual shots.  This board was done about 6 months prior to the other examples as a way, while I was still tweaking the script, for me to start to visualize a layout of a scene.  The board also shows the inserts [top and bottom of page] but more than that, it shows the style of the shot.  This shot was originally designed as one long steadicam shot that would play without cuts.  I had Dan draw the inserts or tighter shots just in case the wide master shot [long unbroken steadicam shot] did not play as I intended.  To give me the option of cutting into and out of the shot with tighter pieces.

This third board shows a small piece of a chase sequence.  It is labeled scene 31 page 2.  If I remember correctly their were about 10 pages to this sequence.  You can read the camera direction [hand held] in the top right corner and if you follow the lines of the drawing they are supposed to take you through a camera pan that follows the actors.  You can also see that the character names on this board are different.  Again, that is because I worked with Dan here in the US before finishing the shooting draft of the script in India