Early Development

For this project, the largest evolution in my planning process for a video was the way I approached storyboarding. Previously any storyboards I did were stick figures to quickly remind me of a general visual i needed to achieve a line of story. This was the first time I have ever made storyboarding a large part of the pre-production proces. In the past I may have sketched out a handful of boards to give the crew and cast a basic understanding of the style we were all working together on. Now, I've used them as if they were the video shot for shot. This has helped enormously. Initially they were created to think through composition better for that more polished look I want, yet now I see the additional pain that they have saved me. Through meetings with John Park (my professor) we agreed to plot photographs of the boards together in iMovie and synch them to the song. By doing this I was able to see what sort of timing each shot needed to flow well during PRODUCTION, and NOT in editing which was already a wonderful new thing for me. Watching the edited boards a week later with John, an even better understanding of this tool came about. Watching it with new eyes we were able to discuss the flaws in the harmony between the story I had created and the tone of the song. This first iteration of the video included a gunshot and some strange timing as to the drama, which when compared to the tone of the song did not work well together. It should be noted that the set of storyboards edited together was also already a second collection of storyboards from a first set. The first set involved many more boards and introduced way too many characters.
Below is a link to this early (second) set of storyboards as they were edited together:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmpSZ9T4gqc