I'm having trouble storyboarding a movie because of covid restrictions.

[Brian Drysdale]

Best not work on a professional film if you take things too literally, because there's often a lot of humour and power games going on. If you take things literally you''ll end up getting lost.

[Ryan Elder]

I think I take things humorously a lot better in person, when shooting for sure. It's just if I am asking for advice and someone tells me something or send me something I assume they may be serious. But good point. But I guess having people be tested doesn't do a lot of good then on productions now, or will it help? I don't want to put people at risk any more than other productions of course.

[Paul R Johnson]

The problem is that testing is designed to show the presence or absence of the virus at the time of testing.

It's useless to tell you how healthy the cast and crew are, just that at the test time, they were OK, but an hour later, if tested again, they might pass the threshold and fail. The danger has not been reduced. If you did a risk assessment, the test would hardly change the risk level. With any illness where you are infectious before you have symptoms, the test really solve nothing. My wife works in a hospital. She has not been tested once. It was decided that most staff probably had had it early on, and their healthy status is evidenced by the fact they don't feel ill. Testing somebody positive or negative would do what? For new staff there may be a point, but for existing staff - being tested positive would mean going into isolation, when they may well have been infectious six months ago, and just have antibodies. This is why employers have such a hard time. Young people in particular have an invulnerable attitude but the people they may well infect could die? Forget the legal stuff - morally - how would you feel if your production killed somebody - maybe your DoP caught it by the lighting guy sneezing, and he took it home to his elderly mum who has asthma? It would be your fault morally - possibly also legally? If you do not NEED to make the movie now, why do it.

You'd also come on here and say you have a live scene so how do you rewrite it so the two people can get close without being less than a certain distance apart? We'd say don't do it. You'd ignore this and ask if it could be done with a split screen, and how best to do that. We'd say don't do it, you'd then ask about green screening, and we'd say don't do it and you'd ask that as you are going to green screen it and put them closer together in post, would this impact on the realism of the scene - and so on? We know your way of thinking pretty well now.

We have a pandemic. People are dying. Making a movie in your spare time, with an amateur cast, no moment and few resources can wait till it is over. If you did make it, are cinemas in your area actually open for people to watch it?

[Pete Cofrancesco]

I think we’re partly to blame. In the previous thread we advised to him not to compose a sound track before filming. While that’s the logical order of production we weren’t suggesting he rush into filming in the height of a pandemic.It’s really funny he seemingly never takes our advice and on the rare occasion he does, he doesn't acknowledge it, instead he draws the wrong conclusion and jumps off into another tangent. He really has knack for getting himself into impossible situations.

Ryan before you replan to death a new approach, maybe you should contact your cast and crew to see if they want to film in a pandemic. If they don’t then that will quickly put this whole idea to bed.

We get it you’re bored, but just find something else to do.

[Ryan Elder]

Well I guess I am just worried it will get worse if I wait. Right now it's only five people allowed on a shoot, if it's not a professional production company. Where as in a year from now it could be zero people allowed for all I know. I don't mean to sound insensitive, I mean for jobs in general and feel we might well make business investments now while we can.

As for if theaters will be open to watch the movie, I thought that if I made a feature it didn't have a chance of going to theaters, and thought it would go straight to streaming anyway at best.

[Brian Drysdale]

Currently, the odds are that life will get close to normal by the summer.

[Josh Bass]

I don't mean to brag, but I really think if we try hard enough, here in the USA we can keep the current situation going til mid 2023.

[Ryan Elder]

I guess I just had trouble seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with covid. Well I could just get back to storyboarding it then. And storyboard the shots I actually want, rather than shots for covid restrictions.

[Paul R Johnson]

Had you already set a shooting date for the script that is the finished, storyboard hardly touched and composer totally confused. It does seem you’re nowhere remotely near shooting so why are you even worrying about changing things. Finish the script. Produce your story boards then fix a date. This means for you, the summer doesn’t it?

[Ryan Elder]

Yeah the summer would be nice. I can finish the storyboards then. Out of all the storyboarding programs that are free, is there one that is better than the rest. I've tried a few but they are not as good. Unless the paying ones are worth getting.

I've tried just drawing it myself, but I have trouble keeping the characters looking consistant which can lead to confusion as to which character is which in the more complicated shots.

[Brian Drysdale]

Practice is the best method of improving drawing.

Just put a distinctive feature on each character, so that they stand out from the others.

[Josh Bass]

or just write their names literally anywhere on them, or near them.

Yes, shockingly, products that are NOT given away for free are often superior to competing products that ARE given away for free

[Ryan Elder]

Oh well, it's just the paying ones, you can move the characters around in 3d environments where as I just wanted still images. But I guess the paying ones are better for those as well. Is it worth doing the storyboards before having most of the locations yet, or is it still good to do preliminary ones to get ideas of how it will all be, and related to budget do you think?

[Greg Miller]

Originally Posted by Ryan Elder

I guess I just had trouble seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with covid.

If there is no light at the end of the tunnel then we will end up with a much smaller world population, a collapsed world economy, and everyone trying to figure out what their new life will be. Certainly an amateur movie will have no significance to the universe. In which case you won't be making amateur movies in the future. So maybe you should temporarily stop all the endless mental flagellation and instead consider a new hobby, and possibly figure out what you will be doing -- for real -- a year or two from now.

[Brian Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Ryan Elder

Is it worth doing the storyboards before having most of the locations yet, or is it still good to do preliminary ones to get ideas of how it will all be, and related to budget do you think?

If you don't know what the locations look like, it's difficult to do detailed storyboards.

You can do rough ones, which may or may not change, but I recall doing a short where the storyboard artist (who later did "Game of Thrones") came down on the location recce. The director talked him through the shots he was thinking of and on the shoot you could often pick the focal length of the lens based on the drawings.

Other storyboards aren't as detailed. just blobs with big noses, while others, produced by ad agencies, had hardly any detail and often ignored apart from key points. The latter were often intended for the clients and the director was expected to do better,on the actual production.