Storyboard and Scriptwriting

When we were given these tasks over easter, I thought nothing of it, they seemed relatively easy and we had an entire month to finish them off, which is quite generous. When it got round the the actual doing, though, they (or at least the scriptwriting) too a little more time and thought than expected.

I attempted the scriptwriting first, a story about a Leaf which had been in my head for quite a while. Well, the Character had been in my head, and it's basically just a leaf, so I thought up a little story for it as I went along. I wanted to do something different, something alternative to the normal start/middle/end story format, but this was a lot harder than I thought, and my finished result is actually quite a normal story, just in an unusual circumstance. Something I found difficult was the directions, especially since my characters were all static. I ended up writing the story first and transplanting the directions in later, which i'm not sure is the best approach. I think they may have suffered slightly because I was trying to keep the script length down to a page and a half. I wanted to make the script snappy and witty like the writing that I admire, (eg. Chuck Phalanuik stuff, minus the violence) but since I don't do much writing it wasn't easy, (and obviously came nowhere near to his standard) but I'm reasonably happy with the final outcome.

The storyboard was much easier than the Script, and was what saved me when I had writers block. Also since Andy said they don't have to be works of art, it freed me up a little, allowing me to concentrate on the action in the poses of the characters and the camera angles that I wanted. This was nice but after seeing a few other peoples storyboards i'm wondering whether or not I went too loose (which is weird for me). Nevertheless I had fun thinking about the film language, and think I got some pretty cool shots here and there. It's an interesting way of thinking for sure.

All in all it was a very interesting task to be set, but I hope we don't have to do it again any time soon, I'd rather concentrate on areas that I plan to progress in (i'm pretty sure i'm not going to be a scriptwriter in the future, lol).