Basically, a Storyboard artist takes a script and works with the Director to help plot out the visual sequential order of shots that need to be filmed. Storyboarding is used in commercials, movies, music videos - and a whole lot more. Sometimes the sketches can be very detailed, and sometimes not - but as long as their is some use of planning done, it helps save time in production.
To help ease the student frustration, I showed them the storyboard to film comparison from a segment of Nightmare Before Christmas
I think the students using the app went quite well, as some of them were using Storypages in the past, and it is a fairly easy app to pick up. They can make a scene just a drawing, a drawing w/text or just text.
After the students broke up into groups to see who had to draw what, I tried to work around the "sharing" issue of our guest wireless server that the IPods use so that I could easily get the student samples off and then print them off for the students.
Unfortunately, there were several issues against us. The email option that the IPods use could only handle 10 mobile devices, and our school has a total of 59 IPods (you do the Math). So some of the students could email me their storyboard as a .PDF, which was the best option, whereas several others got locked up in cyber space somewhere.
The other option is to export all of the images to the IPod's Camera Roll. Which I then had plug that IPod into the Macbook and import them via IPhoto. From IPhoto create an album, copy the contents of the album to a folder on the Macbook's desktop and then upload those images to my Posterous site (phoo!)
Above is an example from Ipod 6, it would seem the exporting, importing, uploading has shuffled the images around a bit. I am not sure if this student's work is in the proper order but I am just happy it is up. NOW - should I go through the process of combining all of these into a .PDF to print for them too?!
But after all is said and done, and I was able to go through the process of printing this work off for my students - it would seem the majority of them didn't even use the boards when they started to film.
I recommended that they take their boards with them, and as they finished shooting a scene, their Producer should mark it off of their shooting schedule.
Perhaps I just gave the students an excuse to get distracted with other apps on the IPod or just wasted their time to delay filming - but I really wanted them to understand the planning process when it comes to film production.
Our next step of the film process is to review the film clips that they shot (dailies) and perhaps do some acting excercises and games. To check out my Prezi lesson plan you can modify it to use in your own classroom and do film making in your class
