CMU School of Drama


Friday, December 23, 2016

Seeing Film Scenes Side-By-Side with the Original Storyboard Drawings Is So Cool

sploid.gizmodo.com: In these wonderful videos by Glass Distortion, you get to see the creative process of filmmaking: you can read what was written in the script, peek at what was imagined in the storyboards, and see the finished scene that was filmed for the movie. It’s the whole sausage making of turning words on a page into visual art laid out right in front of you.

1 comment:

Sasha Schwartz said...

It’s super cool to see the storyboards side by side with what actually ended up being filmed and cut for the movie. I feel like one of the biggest differences between live theater and television is that so much of the joy of live theater is the unpredictability of it all, even for the actors and the director themselves a lot of the time, that just isn’t present within most contemporary main-stream movie making since it’s all about getting the perfect shot and shooting the same scene over and over again with minute differences until the director is happy. I was so impressed with the amount of detail and precision that went into the storyboards, especially for the action scenes such as those in The Dark Knight since there were some parts that felt like split-second cuts between several incredibly complicated large-scale scenes of car crashes. I guess that for this reason they had no choice but to make the storyboard incredibly detailed, because the special effects it took to achieve these large-scale moments are so high-tech, and would need to be perfect to look believable. Some of the other ones, like Star Wars and No Man Left Behind were able to be a little less detailed, since a lot of the action of the scene came from the emotions of the actors themselves. Even so, their movements were almost exact to what the storyboard showed. It’s cool to see how a simple sketch that isn’t even super aesthetically pleasing can convey so much, showing that there can definitely be a helpful divide between art to please the eye and art to get an idea across. The Chanel commercial was so incredibly detailed, even including color, which makes sense since for a perfume commercial, the aesthetic of the video is so important (because how else are you going to get across the idea of a smell?). That storyboard in itself would make a beautiful commercial I think. It’s very cool to see these behind-the-scenes tidbits, and it makes me appreciate a lot more what goes on behind the movies we love to sit back and watch.