The Importance of Storyboarding, Sound And Colour

StoryBoarding: many famous directors (one of whom is M.Night.Shyamalan) use storyboards to get an extremely rough idea of what the film will look like before they actually go out and shoot the footage. Shyamalan says "storyboarding takes time, however it's worth it." He also says that "storyboarding is a chance to select and make specific props" for example in "The 6th Sense Shyamalan had a door knob made to shoot a specific shot where you could see the child's reflection in the handle and we can see his facial expression, this helps add to the atmosphere and pace of the movie. Shyamalan also says "it's a continuall point of reference". This can help guide you through a film even if it is a tiny guideline, it is still there if you forget what the original plan was.

Sound: M.Night.Shyamalan also says that sound is really important in his films. For "The 6th Sense he used a load of people and animals breathing to create the creepy music for the film which he said worked effectively because you couldn't tell. Also in "The Village" Shyamalan has taken a piece of sound and repeated and reverbed it. He says"sound is a character itself" and "you don't realise it's there as a viewer."





Colour: M.Night.Shyamalan also uses colour to help tell the story in most of his films, For example "The Village". Shyamalan uses the colour red to show the evil creatures (a symbolic sign of blood danger etc) and yellow to show the good and innocent people from the village. However there is a director called Wong Kar Wan who uses a lot of colour in the film "In The Mood for Love". For example the scene with the woman going down an alley to get her meal. Even though she is going down a dark alley Wan uses colours (the colour of her dresses) to show what mood she's in e.g. green, envy etc. Colour is very important in films because it helps by adding an effect to the scene.

Continuity Task

We were given our task which was to take 15 or so different shots of two characters (one enters the room). We had to make sure we didn't break the 180 degree rule and have shot reverse shot in our final piece. We used James's house as our location and we had james and Charlie in our piece. We did a quick storyboard and we created a quick story which we had 4 days to film. After we had filmed the shots and we were happy we had at least two good shots of every angle, we had to edit the piece together and add a tiny sound clip to complete our continutity task. What went well with our continuity task was the fact that we managed to shoot the shots, edit and add sound in a resonable ammount of time. However what was bad was the fact that I made mistakes such as being in shot when the camera was on and not realising that my reflection was in the window for one of our shots.

EVALUATION:

overall we got 32/60 marks. What was good about our work was: the effective use of sound (diegetic/non diegetic), our continuity and our framing. Our SRS was also good as was the fact that we stuck to the 180 degree rule.

To improve our work we should: use more CU/MCU which would have helped improve our piece a lot. Our framing in some areas was bad so we should improve on that. Our other target was framing to forground point.

Overall I think our piece was really succesfull.

Questionnaire Results

Final Idea:

Our final idea is to do a psychological thriller. We decided to do a psychological thrilller because to meet the conventions was very easy, also it is very easy with the equipment and location that we have. The narrative is: Someone moves to a new town, however the town is not what it seems. Everyone is acting very strange and some wierd occurences continually happen. We were going to film this probrably in a city to help with mise en scene and we are going to get actors and actresses for the roles. Our first idea was quite simular, it was of a man being chased down a dark alley and is ambushed at the other end (we do not see the attackers faces). We decided however that this was a bit too simple however we wanted to develop the idea of filming in the city further and that is how we came up with our final idea.

Thriller Mind Map By Me, James And Louise