Storyboards

 As a way of planning our music video product, my group and I decided to draw up a storyboard showing the vital frames that we wanted to include within our product. This way we could:

• refer back to it during the filming process to see if we'd missed anything
  
• refer back to it in the editing process to remember the order in which we wanted the music video to play
  
• to see if our final music video would work well and made sense, enhancing the themes and ideologies that we'd set out to show the audience.
  
• help us consider the type of shot (close-up, mid shot, long shot) and what action would be happening in order to make our filming process more efficient and make it easier to create a shot list. 

I think the overall process of creating a storyboard helped me to consider in detail what kind of things I wanted to be happening within my music video product and also because I was using Narrative, Performance and some concept within the video, it helped me to see if there was a clear balance between the three.

When it came to filming, my storyboard along with my shot list made my groups sessions more efficient as we didn't have to try and remember what we'd planned back in class verbally and had it in front of us shot by shot. The story board was a visual way of showing me what each shot had to look like and what piece of music it was going to go to. This then went forwards and helped me with things such as - length, speed, accuracy, lip sync timings etc.

However, I think when it came to editing I began to notice some of the flaws in our work. There were certain sequences within the song that the storyboard hadn't fully covered - luckily it wasn't too much of a problem because they were parts that we'd specifically planned to have the same shot but rewound and so on. But also, once we laid all of the frames out onto the Final Cut Express timeline, it was apparent that there were sections that were performance heavy (i.e. the artist lip syncing for 5-6 seconds as oppose to 2-4) which made watching quite tedious, so rearranging of certain frames was needed. Therefore if I were to do a storyboard again, I think I'd consider in more detail the delicate and tiny bits of detail to save a lot more time when it came to editing and making changes. 

In conclusion, the storyboard helped me a lot in the practical side of my brief as when working towards deadlines (just like music videos do in the real industry) it's effective to be working efficiently and with a visual prompt such as the one I'd created, that skill became possible.