Video of the Week: Film Noir Storyboarding Assignment

This week's Video of the Week is my Film Noir Storyboarding Assignment. Check it out below:

Story Boarding Assignment from Bills Films on Vimeo.

I made this video last year as an assignment for my storyboarding class at BYU. The assignment was to take 10 words (which the professor gave us), and then put them together in an order that made sense, storyboard out the shots, shoot it, and edit it.

This assignment was a lot of fun for me to do, because there was no genre attached to the assignment, just cryptic words such as "eye," "gun," "light switch," etc... It was fun to associate a genre and a mood to these words, and then to storyboard the actual process. I had previously done a blog post about concept art and storyboarding, which has actually seen a lot of traffic for this blog, so if you're interested in reading it again, go here. Anyway.

I decided on a moody black and white (very grainy) look, hearkening back to the classic film noir films of the 1940s and 50s. I'm not saying that I achieved anything like unto those films (for one, those films are 4:3, not 2.35:1), but the mood comes across well. The idea for the girl's lips to be the only thing in color was taken from a few different sources, but mainly Schindler's List, where the only color in the film is the girl's red coat (not counting the ending scene). 

I shot the first three shots at night in our apartment. Instead of using smoke in order to see the light in shot #2, I used baby-powder. Turns out that with the grain you can barely see it. Oh well. Shots 4-8, and 10 were shot at BYU in the longest hallway I could find, and shot 9 was back at our apartment, for obvious reasons (although it doesn't really match the background. Probably should have filmed a background plate and then shot Brian in front of a greenscreen so that it would match better. Hindsight is 20-20).

Below are the storyboards that I came up with. And just a disclaimer, I don't claim to have any skill with drawing or any of that. Anyway:

Very rudimentary drawings, but they get the point across.

The smaller frame with the arrows on it means to zoom in. I didn't end up zooming in the film, but simply used a closeup instead.

As you can see, it's a very simple sequence. I originally storyboarded it a little out of order. And while I'm not that great at math, you'll notice there are only 9 boards, not 10. Couldn't find the other one.

Technical bits about the video: it was shot on the Panasonic GH2 with the (extremely slow) 14-140mm f/4-5.8 and the (a lot faster) 20mm f/1.7. Edited in Sony Vegas, and the music is from The Bourne Identity. Used the new Steadicam for one shot, and, as you can tell, I needed to do a LOT more practice with it.