Planning - Storyboarding and Script Writing

 Introduction 

Hello and welcome back, today we’ll be going over storyboarding and script writing. Me and my partner struggled to get together due to our schedules and after school activity’s but we were finally able to align our schedules and meet up after school at a local coffee shop to discuss our storyboard and get it all on paper. About two days later we met up again to script write which wasn’t significantly difficult because we just followed our storyboard.

Storyboarding Scene 1

Me and my partner each printed the sheets seen below prior to coffee date so that we would have an organized way of getting these ideas down, the first type of sheet with six boxes was given to us in class and we printed the other three box style just in case and thank god we did, we liked how the papers organized our scenes and had space for a brief description which we used for explain the shot and transiting that would follow plus if the particular shot contained any audio.

This is the first half of our first scene, this our nostalgic scene where the setting is established while credits show in the corners and nostalgic music plays while young Emily is seen happy and having fun.

Whether of most we have the extra kids isn’t completely determined since it would be ideal to have the extra kids since it would be more realistic while creating a bigger contrast between Emily in this scene and after the nostalgic scene where she is alone with the coach. 

The issue we have at hand is that the time we are allowed to film is between 12 and 3 because the gym is closed at that time on a week day since kids are still at school, meaning me, my partner, and our actors will have to miss at least two hours of school so the more actors we want the more difficult this becomes, especially with younger actors since they don’t have much of a say in missing school and we’d have to talk to each parent about the filming. 

Luckily we have two idea to overcome this issue if it does arise, first, we stay at the gym a little after three which we are allowed but the gym will fill with kids making filming a bit harder but then we’d be able to ask a couple parents and kids to help with our film. Hopefully it doesn’t come to this but it’s good to have options.

Second solution is we find only one child aka young Emily and then the nostalgia scene will be just her which would still work since private lessons are a thing and the scene would be focused on her.

Scene 2

This is our second scene which takes place at the same gym but takes place a couple years after the first scene. The transition between the two is match up between the feet of young Emily on the beam and the older her, followed by a vertical pan revealing the new older her which from facial expression and body language is clearly much sadder and drained.

Then she fails a flip and has a conversation with her coach about it. The different shots and transitions can be seen below on our paper plus a simple drawn picture of what we are imaging.

We wanted to make sure we drew our scenes out to stay on the same page about what we expect this to look like and frequently through this process we would imaginen what we have so far and how many seconds the scene would be to make sure our film opening is within the required time of two minutes but also not over. The scene ends when the conversation does and then transitions with a straight cut to scene three.

Scene 3

This scene takes place in Emily’s mother’s car as she picks up Emily from her private practice. To set the location for this scene we added a clip of the cars wheels in between the scene of Emily’s conversation at the gym and her conversation in the car, also allowing a break from dialogue and instead having the sound of the car on pavement  driving away from the gym.

In the car Emily and her mom have a conversation that upsets both of them and then they drive past a park while Emily reflects out the window comparing herself to the happy kids in the park.

Script Writing

This part took less time then the storyboarding since we were able to use our papers as a guide for the script. We did have to do a little bit of research on how to format our script in a realistic manner but after some researching we got the hang of it and started the process of thinking of line that matched our scenes and character emotions, then after we typed down the lines we thought would work, we spoke out the scene as if we were recording.

This helped us make the dialogue more natural sounding and concise. This also allowed us to figure out what tone or what way the sentences should be said to better match the idea we had so we wrote tones for things into the script which you can see below. This script was also done after school where we had a bit more time then we did at the coffee shop so we had some extra time and used it to look for sounds and music we could use in the nostalgic scene and the car scene that was background music from the radio.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_OraBWnLJf8nAW2wRjhq3aGTnJ8Ewkrtd512ucKNSMk/edit?usp=sharing

Conclusion 

This week has been very productive and I’m happy me and my partner were able to meet up a couple times to work on our storyboarding and scriptwriting. This is our last planning post so I’m glad we got this done and I’m excited to start our production phase. We know these papers and script will help us when filming time comes along with other things we’ve accomplished in our post like the characters outfits so we’re looking forward to using them. Thank you for reading and see you next time to start our production phase.