CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, December 01, 2020

Use Storyboards to Design Scene Changes

Dramatics Magazine: STORYBOARDS HAVE been used in motion pictures for decades, but for the movies they are mostly about planning the camera movements required for each shot. Storyboards can also be powerful development and communication tools for theatrical scenic and lighting designers, especially for shows with multiple locations and many changes of scenery.

1 comment:

Katie Pyzowski said...

I’ve had an interesting run-in with storyboards over the past week or so. For the Playground piece I am working on we are streaming our piece over a software called OBS that lets us rearrange squares of content and then stream it to a different platform. Since the software has so much flexibility, our director went through the script and storyboarded all the different scene changes in the show. I was then able to use those storyboards to create the desired arrangements and set ups in OBS. I concur with everything this article mentions about making sure all the information needed is present on the documentation, especially if it’s documentation shared with others not privy to the thought process of the person that made the storyboard. So, even if real life scenery is not currently a real thing, the storyboarding process is definitely still essential to the theatre making process, regardless of the modality.