Many filmmakers lie in bed at night with film ideas flying in and out of their heads, some seem great at the time but are just a laughing matter in the morning while others are written down and soon begin the pre-production process. The difficult bit for me is taking an idea and sharing what I see in my head with others, you need to digitising your film. In my new film ‘Commit’, that I countlessly blabber on about, I had written down a complex idea a few years back and had been working on the paperwork of it for a while, however trying to tell people or explain the idea never came out how I wanted it to. Id either get lost with what I was saying or lose the listeners attention because words did not explain the idea properly. Considering film is a visual media it seemed sensible to try to engage my listener through imagery rather than words but I really suck at drawing. I checked out a few storyboard programs and Celtx storyboard section but just didn’t find any of them worth the hassle or they cost too much money to justify it. I am competent with Photoshop so thought it maybe more interesting and easier to explain to people if I could use icons and images from Google to show the story.There are many posts on the net about using Photoshop for storyboards but most of them still involve you being able to draw in the first place, which for me defeats the point. I wanted to take a simple paper storyboard template, which can be downloaded here, and put images that I haven’t drawn on there so people could understand the story and action easier. The power of being able to copy and paste meant lack of scribbling out and more time creating the set of each shot within my digital storyboard frame. It also meant with a few clicks I could share it with other crew through email, could change characters costume’s endless times and swap scenes or shots about effortlessly.
If you are interested in viewing the storyboards half the draft ones are here (these are quite different the film as they were made at the very beginning process).
Animation
If you want to take this further and actually show the film with moving image but you dont have the time or money to shoot a trailer then you could try making an animation. This comes in really handy if your pitching to a crowd-funding website or looking for external investors. I have no real experience with After Effects, apart from using it to stabilize clips – see here, so creating an animation from scratch is always going to be a big step but hopefully this shows that anyone else can do it even if you dont have any After Effects experience.
However this was a lengthy process I did take me a good few days, but i didnt actually create it completely from scratch. VideoCopilet is a great website that teaches users how to create amazing things in AE easily. One of their famous plugins they made was called SureTarget, click here to find out more. I used this to go from scene to scene which keeps the viewer interested and also looks pretty neat. Instead of having text the center of the frame like they do in VideoCopilet’s video, I used an image and built the characters into the set. By key framing your characters/stickmen you could make them tell the story and because SureTarget is 3D you dont only change the x (left to right) and y (up and down) axes of your characters you also change the z (depth). That may sound complex but basically it allows you to move your characters from the front of the screen to the back of the screen, giving your animation a realistic look.
If you want to take a look at the animation in AE so you can see how I did it exactly then try downloading the project here. You obviously wont have any of the files but it should let you see how each layer works without them, if not then please comment and I will try and sort something out.
Digitising your film idea can really help communicate with your audience shows how passionate your are about your project to others. If you are writing a film and have the same difficulty expressing whats inside your head then give this a go, it worked well for me and hopefully will work well for you.
