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Zams storyboarding class on friday was another very useful class from Zam. The topic of the day was storyboarding and how useful they are in crafting a film together and also how to properly construct one.

The main points brought up through his experiment of showing us a scene from North by North West, was that you should only pick out the very important bits from a scene to storyboard and not to just storyboard every little thing that happens, as you soon run on 5 pages for about a twenty second clip.
This seems obvious but before hand I had though you would have to storyboard every little detail, so this was a good point to pick up on.

I will definitely put alot more effort into a storyboard in the future as effectively it is the only way of visualising to someone else what is going on in your head.

Also that a good storyboard can make the difference between your film being picked up or not and even effect the budget, as Alien's budget was doubled after they saw Riddley Scots storyboard for it.

We then went onto storyboard a short story given to us by Zam, this was a fun little exercise as it put into action what we had just learned before hand. Although time was very strict, and theres nothing I hate more than drawing under pressure, feels like my head will explode.

Theres not really much else to say from the class, but I did enjoy it and took away a good few points from it. I look forward to building on what we learned.

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This week in Andy's class we went back on what we built on last year about genre and iconography. This was all about how when a audience member sits down to watch a film, they know exactly what to expect from the movie. As when you see the Legally Blond 2 poster for instance, and how you can't compare how good this film is to a film of a different genre as its a different playing field.

I feel we did pick on a number of good points during the class and that its interesting how genre can hide itself rather cleverly inside other genres, such as Die hard and a wester movie. I'm not sure the same can be applied to any Michael Bay's films though. I did see pars with this class and one of Richards classes about how the audience know what to aspect from the genre of movie they are sitting down to watch and how you don't meddle to much with that formula.

We have also been picking up on a number of points relating to framing of a shot and how the framing can add alot of depth and relay alot of information about what story you are trying to tell. Just by planning out where you want your audiences eyes to look at in a particular shot. Its interesting to pick up on all of this as I don't think I would have done this as much before, although as Andy said doing this for every shot is not necessary and can be the flaw of your film. If it comes naturally then throw it in their.
In any future film I am involved with I think I will defiantly think twice about the framing and how more can be added to it, rather than it being a flat two dimensional shot. It always interesting when something is pointed out that you never notice before, like the Citizen Kane shot of him playing in the snow, I would have picked up on it un-continuously but would have never thought about it.


We then went onto watch a documentary about Film Nwaaaaaa erihgerg

This was picking up on the factual research aspect we have been learning recently. Personally I didn't enjoy the documentary too much as I feel it did begin to go round in circles as it became a tad stale after you heard the forth persons view on it. Maybe it was just not the thing to watch on a Monday morning/afternoon. Or maybe because I'm not a fan of film nwajhsgf, just a tad too depressing for me. I can see the classics are very good films in their own right but still nothing I'd choose to sit down and watch.

Overall a good class to start building on top of what we learned about last year and a gradual step to making us all 'freaking awesome directors'