Hermelinda Codding - Storyboarding & Storytelling

My group got together on Saturday to work out our storyboard all at once, we discussed the story and how we wanted to portray it, and we each sat down and drew how we imagined it to look. We took time and looked at each other's work to and gave everyone a chance to pitch their ideas. We then took bits and pieces of everyone's storyboards, particularly the ones we thought were most cinematically and compositionally effective, and stitched them together. These are some of my storyboards that didn't make it. here we have the monkey king look around a pillar to find nothing but a void(we conceptualized the void to be twinkling with stars) which he assumes to be the end of the universe. cutting to a med. shot of the monkey king very unimpressed by this he begins to laugh, surely he's out of Buddha's hand now I thought to cut to a full shot at a high angle of him laughing, I wanted to emphasize that he was alone here, he feels triumphant but it doesn...

I think its Katz's description of a close-up as being personal is interesting, I always thought of it as just intense. But it makes sense to me that it could intensely personal and intimate. I had a vague knowledge of the 180° rule before but I don't think I had a strong sense of it at all. My assumption was that the camera should not move more than 180° around the subjects in sequencing shots that cut to each other. Or like if you wanted to shoot a conversation from the opposite side of the line of action to reveal something behind the characters in the environment, you would have to put a shot in between, maybe an over the shoulder shot, to make it cohesive and understandable that it is the camera moving and not the subjects. But now that I've written this thought down I'm almost sure that that would be a ridiculous rule to have, the line of action version that Katz explains makes much more sense to me now.

As I was reading the introduction, I found it interesting that I never thought about minute details in the shot of my camera as important. In one of my short films for my video editing class I used a public space on campus as a location, and didn't think about all the extra details in the shots. There was a guy doing his homework on the light table behind my actors, a girl casually walking passed to one of the studios behind the camera, and there was a whole lot of posters that were prominently displayed next to my actors but I never thought about all these things as something that my audience would think of as important to the film. I just thought it was an interesting thing for them to notice while watching because I knew not to see them as important but they didn't. I just thought of it as an unfortunate circumstance of filming in a public space. I also really appreciate having focal length explained to me as I've never understood it before. Professors that taught me ho...

While reading, I found it interesting just how much a production designer does for a film. I had already known that their job was difficult by the vague understanding that they manage and coordinate all the departments to work together and get to the final product. I just didn't realize how much they contributed to each departments work. The term Visualization stood out to me because it's something that I generally don't do. It is mostly because of a sense of perfectionism that I have trouble pausing myself to really think about my work until I'm done with it, and by that point it's too late for me to go back and fix things. This is definitely a thing I want to work on to improve myself as an artist and ultimately as a person too.

I registered late for the class so I guess I gotta start out running! I'll do my best!