What is storyboard?

Storyboard is really important in film making as it can solve many problems before and after the filming. The storyboard is basically telling the visual ideas of the film, so it gives the director and the DOP or camera operator a detailed idea of the camera position, the storyline and let everyone have a unified picture. Furthermore, it can also help the actors as they can have a rough idea of what are they going to act and how can they act. In addition, storyboard is like the planning before the shooting, so we can use this to roughly estimate the duration of the total clips and some techniques that can be implemented. Also it can help us to save the time and cost, not only in the shooting part, but also in the editing too. After filming, the editor can refer to the previous storyboards for general editing ideas which will them edit much quicker.

As we are going to film our opening sequence, it is important to do a storyboard first. I think it can make us save much time on the shooting day. So for a good storyboard it need to include: 

• The shot number - to help us know the order of each shot clearly
• The Location and characters in it
• The actions
• The lighting and the colour tone of the frame
• The sound - like the dialogue 
• The camera compositions and movements - like the rules of third, low/ high angle shot, symmetry and asymmetry
• The transition - such as a single cut
• The timing of each shot, the pace length
• The description of the shots

When I am researching for the method to make the storyboard. I found that we can use arrows to present different camera movements like track, tilt, pan. Also we can draw a small box and draw arrows to show zoom in and zoom out. This can avoid drawing the similar picture repeatedly.