From the Colloquia Archive at IUPUI, School of Informatics:
Creating and organizing a movie is a complex process. As Marcie Begleiter demonstrates, storyboarding is an essential process to the visualization of media and new media. She works at getting the audience more involved than I expected from a lecturer. She has fine art, liberal arts, film, storyboarding, and communication background. She also talks a bit about how she had her fortunes turn from painting sets to storyboarding and film training early in her career. Opportunity met need with her basic skill set.
Her experience with multidiscipline helped her many times in her career, including her current job in developing an art design school curriculum. Its simple, the story telling that comes from boards has its roots in drawing, spoken word, and songs. She delves into forcing students to describe a movie with no sound and describe what you are seeing in filmic language. She also points out that light travels faster than sound, and we are in part, firstly driven by the image.
Her slides start with the history of storyboards. It was hard to discover because most studios track the costs of a movie and not the art direction of the film from storyboards. They even begin to show the beginnings of mise-en-scene of how the director is going to create the feel of the movie. These early storyboards also served as early location scouting to find the proper places to shoot. Some do quick sketches of highlight, shadow, and mid-tone to show the shots of the film. Others draw more of a “visual metaphor.” The pictures are even less detailed in some but are showing what is to be emphasized in the frame with the objects scaled. The scene in Mildred Pierce shows how the camera is directing the focus in the frame from the ocean to Mildred. It is also a nonverbal queue that happens so fast in transition but greatly aids in storytelling. This is something that can be pre-planned so the direction can be maintained and not lost when in actual production.
She also shows more of a keyframe versus a storyboard, a very detailed shot with a lot of depth and feeling versus a thumbnail sketch. She explains how the eyes are led through the frame. She describes also, Alfred Hitchcock, and the simplicity that show a more logistical point of view. The frames are largely devoid of small details and show more movement in frame which was key to Hitchcock’s success as the characters act in the frames but the viewers also feel they are in the movie themselves. She points out a wider shot of a man hanging at the Statue of Liberty and it shows that attention of negative space; it sucks in the viewers to also feeling like they are less of a character and more of an actor. She really helps to show how varied storyboard are because they are a reflection of the director, less of a 2D representation of frames and more of a capturing of 4D ideas.
