Story Boards

Story boards, they are good things. The week leading up to our first day of filming I have spent quite a bit of time doing story boards of the scenes. A story board helps communicate the shot and scene to everyone, the cast and crew. It helps save time on the set (especially on green screen), and help avoid mistakes. If 2 shots don't work well on the story board, they probably won't in the edit sweet either. It also helps avoid problems such as crossing the 90o rule. Needless to say, I don't story board very much; I usually have such a tight schedule, that even if I had time to make them I probably wouldn't have time to show them to anyone (and I am the whole crew anyway). However, for this protect we budgeted enough time for story boards. Story boards are useful for actors. Specifically when on green screen, they can see what the shot is going to look like, what they are looking at, and what the other actors are doing (who are not even there that day). It has already paid off, too. On our last project, The Amazing Map, our actors really had no idea what they were talking about (you can't tell that by the final video). On this project we decided that it was important that our actors knew what was going on around them. There is a lot more drama and such in this video. So on shoot day, we sat them down and whet through the story boards, having them read their lines as we looked at the shots. This allowed them to gain an understanding of what was happening in the story of the movie.

Of note, Celtx has a built in Story board manager. It has quite a few things to be desired, but honestly I have yet to find a story board program that I like the looks of, even the ones you have to pay for. Either they don't have built in drawing tools, or are 3D and either make ugly looking output images, or are overly complicated.

I did my story boards in The Gimp, using the pen tool to give the lines some "life". I hate the way my hand drawn images end up looking. If I have to keep looking at something all day on a shoot, I want it to be ascetically pleasing.

And so it begins!

Our fist day of filming was on Saturday, the 9th of February. As usual we didn't get as much done as we had hoped, but it was not an unproductive day. A good chunk of the first 1/4 of the day was pend just going over the script with the kids and explaining it to them.

TT and Bebo are back as our Actors (Hosts of the Amazing Map series), we are very blessed to have them. Not only are they good actors, they are a pile of fun to work with. Their excitement is contagious, I wish had taken my camera when we went out to buy their costumes, they were sooooooo excited that they were going to "work" again! 

I am going to talks just briefly about our "studio" set up. We film in out basement, a very small cramped space for filming, the ceiling is only 7ft (luckily we are filing kids so it doesn't come in to play on these projects). I have included a little before and after diagrams, they make it look more spacious than it really is. The main room is 20x11ft. During the week it functions as our TV, living, computer and school room, on filming hay all the furniture gets pushed in to a corner, and we use what little space we have left to film in!

We have a green screen that we hang from the wall with a where and 2 nails, it is quite tall, so we can spread it across the floor for shot where we need feet. We usually spend an hour or 2 sting up ore space the night before, that includes ironing the green screen.

We use a loal starter kit, with 2 omnie umbrella lights for 

the green screen, and one fill light for the kids. They are currently using 500 watt bulbs, and I am thinking that, that may be a bit 

bright (had really hot), so I am considering getting somthing a bit lower, maybe 300 watts.

Our sound is a Rode Shotgun Microphone, that we suspend just above the kids heads. We run the cables along the ceiling to the camera. It picks up everything very well.

Ok yes, an you can never have enough painters tape (my substitute for gaffers tape), you have no idea how fast I can use this stuff!

Ancient Ruin

I have been working on an Ancient Ruin for the beginning of the Amazing Math video, I spend a bunch of time trying to get a tree to look like... well a tree. However Even what I have here on these simple renders is very CPU intensive, so I did a simple comp test to see weather the ruin would look believable in a actual real life environment. I was pleasantly surpassed to find that it worked quite well, sure not photo realistic, but believable enough for our prepossess. So we may be comping this Ruin into a real Jungle instead of a 3D one, as it is faster, and looks better.