Filed under: Equipment | Tags: cinemek, draft, equipment, final, Kelly, nick, Observe, report, storyboard
So as I wait for the outcome of my entry into the Melbourne International Film Festival, I thought it’d be hopefully uself to anyone out there interested in picking up a camera and making a narrative film, to step you through the equipment/tools I use to attempt to make anything I complete of ‘acceptable’ production value quality. But first, it all begins with a script….
The current scriptwriting software I use is Final Draft, a very well-known screenwriting program that formats your script into the Amercan industry standard format. It’s very useful to have a script looking professional, as whilst you may be the only one to read it, it actually helps you asertain the running time of a film. As a rough guide (and this is rough), one page of script equals one minute of screentime. Once you know how many pages your script is/how long it will run for, you can begin to ask yourself questions like, ‘why, in a 7 minute short film, do I introduce the main character on page 6?
Once your script is complete, you can begin to plan for the shots you would aim to show. We all have movies in our heads (unless that’s abnormal and I should speak to a professional), but when you are on location, speaking to your director of photography, the best way to show those shots (and also know how long those shots would take to set up) is to storyboard your project. For storyboarding, I actually kill two birds with one stone. The Cinemek Storyboard Composer is a nifty application for iOS mobile devices (such as the iPhone). You take pictures of a location you intend to use, then insert track marks, dollys, pans, and actor blocking movements into the photo, making obsolete my incredibly stickmen-like storyboards of the past. It is incredibly useful, and was how I storyboarded Observe And Report.
Other than a pen and paper, these were the only tools I utilised before I went to film. There are a variety of pre-production tools/software out there, and I would say that I would have probably benefited from the sue of others, but to me, this is the bare minimum you need to get a low budget project to shooting stage. Of course, once you have a script and shot list sorted, you can then plan on the number of actors required. Which scenes they will be needed, how many locations you need, the equipmtent needed to setup and film a dollying jib shot, the time it will take to setup and film the same shot, pretty much all logistical planning comes from a combination of the script and storyboard.
What pre-production process do you use when planning your own projects? I’d love to hear from other aspiring filmmakers if you would like to post your thoughts/comments below.
Next time, I’ll go through my equipment choices with observe and report, as well as how I picked and chose my actors for the film.
Nick
