Storyboards

[thuviaptarth]

I am going to be talkative this week, and today I am going to talk about storyboards.

I love seeing other people's storyboards; in fact, I am tremendously curious about other people's processes in general.

Examples

• secretlytodream recently put up a scan of one of her storyboards in her "Introduction to Vidding" post at spnroundtable.
  
  
• thingswithwings has several pictures of the brainstorming/outlining/storyboarding from the Yuletide vid she made with eruthros.
  
  
• obsessive24 also put up scans of her storyboards at spnroundtable, which is clearly a Secret Hang-Out for Vidding Discussion, if by "secret" you mean "completely public."
  
  

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. I've posted examples of mine with explanations below.

All about me (warning for large images)

I keep hoping to find someone whose vid storyboards contain pictures, like traditional storyboards; like everyone else's I've seen, mine are more of an outline. I stole the format from astolat when we were working on "Black Black Heart" and then modified it to suit my needs.

I keep my storyboards in a word processor -- Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Open Office Word, anything that lets me create tables. (I use text documents instead of spreadsheets because that way I can keep other notes in the same file: general themes I want to hit, lists of striking images I may want to use, lists of the episodes most relevant to the vid, descriptions of effects I want to try, etc.) Each table has four columns, one for the timestamp, one for the music and lyrics, one for theme/mood/general imagery, and one for specific clip references. The number of rows depends on the structure of the song and my extremely limited understanding of music. But basically, if I feel like a movement in the music has ended or the qualities of the music have changed in some dramatic way, I make a new row. It's very easy to break out verses and choruses, of course, but sometimes I also break out distinctive instrumental sections. In the storyboard above, you can see that the Music/Lyrics column makes note of striking instrumental sounds as well as the lyrics. (You can also see that I hadn't yet found a transliteration or translation of the lyrics, beyond the bits a friend could translate for me, and guessed wrong on some of the sounds.)

For me, the storyboard is a living document. I use it to start off my brainstorming or record my initial impressions of where the vid is going, but I continue to update it throughout the making of the vid. I use color to tell me status: black text means the clip is on the timeline, blue text means I have to find the clip or make a change, red text means I will have to do some effect in AE rather than Premiere. In the storyboard below, which is from later in the process, the rows are pink because I colored in each one as I completed a section, to encourage myself with the knowledge of how much I'd already done.

But the things that I change most about the storyboards are the Theme and Clips columns. Sometimes I put down new notes when I'm brainstorming, but a lot of the time I am going back and recording changed clips I've already put on the timeline. This is a practice I transposed from writing, where it's sometimes useful to make a backwards outline -- that is, to outline what you've already written, to see what's redundant and what's missing from a draft. (Also, I like being able to look at the outlines and brainstorm in the office. It still looks like I am working, which is not something I could pull off if I were watching drafts of the vid.)

Pink rows are done! The text does not match the vid because I was confident enough of what I had down that I didn't see any point in updating the storyboard. I've also started adding episode numbers after the clip descriptions to see the pattern of episode use in the vid. This helps me out when I'm stuck; sometimes I'll go back to a commonly used episode to emphasize the importance of its key moments, or sometimes I'll go look at an episode I haven't used yet to get fresh ideas.

Your turn
Do you use storyboards or outlines? If so, what do they look like? How do they fit into your vidding process? If you don't use them, do you use some other method to organize your thoughts before you start or do you just jump right in?

Comments

[yhlee]

I usually use outlines, which are scribbled longhand around print-outs of the lyrics. On rare occasion I have used an alternate outline based on a rough musical transcription/piano reduction, because it's easier for me to identify important places in the music that way (especially if I'm going to do something particularly brash in cutting/rearranging the song's structure), but this is frankly usually labor-intensive and I'm not entirely convinced the effort is worth it.

[kass]

I keep an Excel spreadsheet with data on all of my clips: what episode the clip comes from, its beginning and ending timestamp on the episode clock, and a field where I put something which will help me ID the clip later -- maybe the line of dialogue being spoken at that moment, maybe a description of what's in the clip, whatever I think will trigger my memory at some later date. When I start actually vidding, I take the lyrics and put them in a similar spreadsheet and make notes on what I want to see on each line of lyric.

I'd like to be the kind of person who keeps track of exactly what clips are used in each vid, in case I ever want to revise or remaster, but I'm...not. *g* My biggest challenge is that I tend to clip on the long side, and then trim clips down in HyperEngine as I place them on the vid timeline, so even if I kept a list of which clips I was using, that wouldn't necessarily help me ID the frames I'd chosen...

[such_heights]

Oh goodness, all of this is so much more organised than what I do! I love looking at people's notes, though, they are both fascinating and bewildering for me.

My process really just consists of listening to the song over and over until I know it really well and can visualise most of the vid in my head, then throwing clips on the timeline and tweaking them until they look right.

[laurashapiro]

I used to do this obsessively. My process in my first four or five years of vidding was:

1) Rewatch ALL episodes of show w/pen and paper, making extensive clip notes for each ep.

2) Set up spreadsheet w/ lyrics in column 1, idea/emotion in column 2, clip notes in column 3, and ep titles/numbers in column 4.

3) Capture (hey, it was the early 2000's) all clips on spreadsheet.

4) Start vidding, and immediately discover that at least 30% of clips noted will not work.

5) Return to handwritten clip notes and begin capturing additional source.

6) Carry on vidding.

7) Repeat steps 4 - 6 as necessary.

Up until my last vid, I'd have said that I definitively do not do this anymore, but that's not true. For Hurricane, I returned to a more lyrics-driven vidding focus, and I also returned to a source (BSG) that I hadn't looked at in a long time. I relied heavily on jarrow's BSG clip database, and I made my own spreadsheet the way I used to do.

I've found that when you have a really concrete idea of what you want to achieve, the clip notes/storyboards/spreadsheet way of working helps you stay focused and true to that idea. If you don't have that really concrete idea and you feel you need it before you start vidding, that way of working can help you get focused.

If, on the other hand, you want to try working more organically, letting go of storyboarding can be a great way to free yourself up and see what emerges. I've found it very creatively invigorating, and I often make serendipitous discoveries that I never would have made otherwise. The downsides are: 1) it can be very scary the first time you do it! 2) you're liable to clip way more source than you actually need, and 3) it can take longer for the vid to come into focus, and that may not be comfortable for you.

[thingswithwings]

Oooooh, what a great idea for a discussion! I'm really enamoured of your system - mine is similar, but not nearly so organized, and it doesn't have a separate field for "theme," which strikes me as really useful. Other than the Yuletide vid that I co-vidded with eruthros, I have the same process for all my vids: I transcribe all the lyrics and sounds into a giant word document (like you do, with "horns come in" or "doo da da da doo" or the lyrics or what have you), leaving big spaces between each line of lyrics/sounds. Then I print it out. Eventually I use the big spaces to write in what clips I want to use on that lyric and also what I think the theme is (eg, "Marty's life is boring!" or "wacky adventures! - use clip of hat flying off"), but first there's a whole process that comes before that.

I actually vid a lot (a LOT) like I write academic papers, I'm a little chagrined to admit. I don't start planning until I've clipped absolutely everything, so I have all the clips in my head; then on the backs of the lyrics sheets, I group clips together by type and start sorting out what kinds of visual themes I have to work with, often writing down alllll the clips so that I don't forget to use something crucial later (and so that when I'm like, "damn, don't I have another clip of someone's hat coming off?" I have an easy reference for it). Once all that pre-planning and outlining is done (I literally make an outline, in proper outline format and everything, so that I know what the narrative movement of the vid is) then I go in and write stuff into the blank spaces between the lyrics, matching specific clips to specific bits of the song.

Of course, those processes overlap, because sometimes you know right from the start that that shot of John falling down goes on the funny little musical trill after the second chorus, but for the most part, my whole process is highly structured and EXTREMELY tedious, which is to say, not terribly efficient in terms of vidding quickly, but very efficient in terms of vidding well, and vidding . . . holistically, I guess, with a very firm overall picture.

Not sure that made sense! I had the outline I made for my Back to the Future festivids vid, I'll have to see if I can find it and scan it in to explain what I mean. :)

[thuviaptarth]

I wish I knew how to read music! I have been thinking about learning how to, because it would be so useful to be able to note things more precisely than "the bump after the glittery tintinnation," which is what I have to do now.

[thuviaptarth]

I tried to do a spreadsheet once, but having a row for every single line made me feel caged in, unable to brainstorm or establish a flow. Which is obviously a psychological block, rather than an inevitable effect of spreadsheets, but nevertheless I indulged my subconscious and went back to bigger rows.

I always trim long when I'm pre-clipping because I want to be able to shift around the clip if I need to without having to redo the whole thing from scratch.

[thuviaptarth]

can visualise most of the vid in my head

Oh, I am in such envy of you! I can't do this. I can't remember the visuals precisely enough and half the time when I do remember them, when I go back to look at them I remembered them wrong. So I have lots of notes so I have things to fall back on when the first try doesn't work.

[thuviaptarth]

Oooo. There is hope of getting to a time when I will not have to do (1)? Because right now it doesn't seem possible.

Ironically, for the vid I'm using as an example of storyboards, I threw it out--er, closed the file--and just started clipping the episodes I knew would be crucial and putting things on the timeline, because all the structure was making me impatient and I felt ready to vid.

I tried making a clip database for SCC and found it impossibly tedious. I did basically break down every scene in SCC by character and brief description, but that was because (a) I knew I'd be making a lot of SCC vids with a lot of different focuses; and (b) it's not that much source.

[thuviaptarth]

I actually vid a lot (a LOT) like I write academic papers, I'm a little chagrined to admit.

I am fascinated by the similarities and differences between writing and vidding. For me vidding is a cross between writing essays and writing fiction. I outline fiction, but much more loosely than I do nonfiction; there are a few key points I want to hit, so I write those down, and then as I go on, more things that will happen later come up and I write those down, and so on. I basically need to know the start, the end, and a few points in between -- the arc of the story or vid -- in order for things to work. Oh, and theme! It used to frustrate me when people in writing classes were dismissive of thematic analysis, saying writers didn't think up themes ahead of time, because in fact I do have to have an idea of the theme before I start. Sometimes I am wrong and sometimes I am right and always I am incomplete, but it is part of accumulation around the knot of idea that has to happen before the project comes alive.

I am kind of neurotic about forgetting things. This is why writing is my favorite social technology.

You are much stricter about the division between steps than I am. I am always going back and forth between them.

I had the outline I made for my Back to the Future festivids vid, I'll have to see if I can find it and scan it in to explain what I mean. :)

Please do! I collect them like jewels.

[damned_colonial]

Ha ha ha oh god, I am so much less organised than this!

Mine usually goes in these phases:

1) Rough cut, proof of concept

I know the song I want and the source I'm intending to use. I roughly grab a few representative clips from my source, not worrying too much about precision or accuracy, and throw them down over the music. I play it and see if it "moves" right. That is, does the movement of the visuals sort of work with the music?

2) Breaking the music up into sections

I look at the lyrics and listen to the music a bunch, and decide how to break it up. For a basic pop song, I might break it into choruses, verses, and a bridge. Or whatever. I recently did an instrumental vid and I broke it wherever a new instrument came in, or when the music changed from rough to smooth.

The I go into my timeline in Final Cut and I put down markers at the points between those sections. That is, there'll be a marker at the start of each verse, or whatever.

I count the beats or bars in each section, and make a note in a Google Doc, that will look something like this:

Intro - 8 bars
First verse: 8 bars
Chorus: 16 bars
Second verse: 8 bars
Chorus: 16 bars
Bridge: 8 bars
Chorus (repeated): 32 bars
Fade out: 4 bars

Or whatever. Then I take some rough notes for each section, about what sort of clips I want in that section. If there's a particular word or phrase I want to call out, I might make a note of that there.

At this point, everything is really very highly subject to change. It's just a rough estimate.

3) Clipping

I rip and clip things to approximately chapter size -- clips of 10 minutes or so in length -- and then pull it all into Final Cut. I don't generally *watch* the source until it's in FC, where I watch it at about 8x speed, slowing down if I see anything that looks useful.

When I see useful bits I might either add a marker, giving it a name (hit "m" twice), and then that'll be visible in the browser thingy later. This is particularly handy for marking things like scene changes or major plot points in the source, as it makes it easy to find them again when you need them. Markers are good, too, because if I make a second vid from the same source, the markers will still be there for me. (This is somewhat an artifact of how I use Final Cut -- one project file per source, and if I have multiple vids for that source, I have multiple sequences/timelines within the same project file.)

If I see a particularly useful clip while I'm watching through, I grab it right then and drag it onto my timeline. I just dump it right onto the section where I think I'm going to use it. That is, if it's a clip of someone looking lonely, and I was thinking I was going to go with the loneliness theme for verse 2, I just slap it right down at 1:30 or wherever verse 2 happens. I don't get too exact about it, just put them roughly in the right place for now.

Depending on the vid in question and how it's structured, I might start mostly doing the stuff that comes first in the timeline, or I might skip around a lot more. So far it seems like that depends more on whether I'm telling a story that progresses from one thing to another, or whether it's more of a clip show without a plot as such. Right now I'm doing a multi-fandom vid that's pretty much "This stuff? AWESOME!" and no particular arc. But another vid I made recently had more of a story, so I was a bit more begin-at-the-beginning-and-continue-til-the-end about it. Not totally linear, but somewhat.

I'll generally get about 50% of the vid laid down fairly easily this way. It might be patchy, but the outline of it is in place.

4) Refinement

As I get more clips, my timeline gets crowded. At some point it becomes hard to find space to put the clips. So then I start saying to myself, is this clip I've just grabbed better than one of the ones I already have? If so, I delete the crappier clip and put the better one in its place. I also find myself shortening clips a lot to give myself more space ("I'm sure I can shave a few frames off that..."), moving things around so that the action flows better, or so things hit exactly where I want them to. I also find myself shuffling clips around to provide balance, especially if I was vidding fairly linearly in the first place. That is, I might have used up a lot of my "good" clips in the first half of the vid, and the second half might be a bit dull on account of it, so in that case I would redistribute the "good" clips so they were more evenly spaced. If things aren't working out I might even reorder whole blocks of clips (say, several bars at a time).

By the time I'm done with this -- that is, I have laid down clips for the whole timeline, and watched right through the source and am fairly sure I've got all the best clips available -- I consider the vid to be at beta stage, and will get someone to take a close look and give me detailed critique.

5) Final pass

My final pass over the vid will mostly be about tweaking timing and stuff, but I sometimes also find points, here, where I realise that a clip's not carrying its weight, and go look for something stronger. This is often because a clip is too static/boring and I want something punchier.

[damned_colonial]

I should also add... I am of the "disk space is cheap!" point of view. My current vid is taking up 60GB of disk space so far, and will probably triple before it's done, and I don't care. So if I were working with eg. a TV series with 100 hours of footage, I'd just convert the whole damn thing to something I can work with. Or at least, I might pick and choose eps, but I wouldn't pick and choose scenes within eps, because disk space is way cheaper than my time.

[laurashapiro]

There is hope of getting to a time when I will not have to do (1)? Because right now it doesn't seem possible.

A combination of knowing the source really well (often through having vidded it before!) and sheer bloody-mindedness will take you far. (:

I've never made a clip database. I tried doing one for Farscape and I petered out after about 3 episodes. I don't know how people do it -- it's mind-numbingly boring.

[lim]

I don't really storyboard any more. I used to, but I kept losing them so I got out of the habit. I do keep notes for vids that I make in little fits and starts - if I'm gonna be interrupted a lot I write stuff down. The most specific notes I've ever made were for a vid that I had a six month gap in the middle when I couldn't vid it and it had no lyrics, so I wrote that shit down in my livejournal:

RISING SUN NOTES GUITAR BRIDGE July 04, 2007, 23:20

Can you tell me?
No
I can show you
1 -> the Prank -> 00:02:28;15
2 -> Potions with Lily -> 00:02:34;23
3 -> the Worst Memory [mudblood]-> 00:02:38;27
4 -> sympathy with the devil -> 00:02:42;00
5 -> the Dark Arts -> Voldemort rises -> 00:02:44;24 [ RISES UP 00:02:46;19]
6 -> the Potter murders -> 00:02:49;02
7 -> repentance -> 00:02:52;15 [DUMBLEDORE WHERE?] ((00:02:54;07))
8 -> REPEAT IN MONTAGE -> 00:02:59;09 to the Out 00:03:02;24
9 -> Close the book (Riddle's diary)-> 00:03:06;04

master/slave tracer
TINT tracer.pg with some blue
Import > tracer.png
apply 3d motion path [[ON A MASTER NULL?]]

opacity expression:
opacityFactor = .75;
Math.pow(opacityFactor,index - 1)*100
precompose to 3d layer name MASTER

Layer > Time > Enable Time Remapping
time remapping expression:
delay = 3; //number of frames to delay
d = delay*thisComp.frameDuration*(index - 1);
time - d

APPLY

Duplicate and name new layer SLAVE
Blending Mode: Soft Light, Add, Difference
Duplicate slave 50+ times

---
(1)drag handles to demark looping area (2) enable time remapping (3)add expression: loopOutDuration(type = "cycle", duration = 0)

In the end obviously I changed my mind; I always do! Normally if I do write things down it is pictures. I don't write down themes or arguments. I grab the lyrics from tinternet and learn the song, and then I write on the lyric line if I have a totally specific picture that has to match, like The world that has made us can no longer contain us [ETW EXODUS SHIPS].

[sabaceanbabe]

Wow. This is WONDERFUL, seeing what other vidders do. I've always wanted to see what "storyboarding" meant in vidding, because people talk about it all the time, but I've never known what to do/how to do it.

When I vid, it's basically because I start to see it in my head as the song plays and it's a like a pressure building in my head so I have to start it to make it go away. I vid more by... instinct, I guess you'd say? Sometimes I have the lyrics in a word document and make notes as to what type of thing I want to have happening where, but this is more the exception than the norm. Sadly, I think this "not having a plan" shows all too much in some of my vids.

Adding this post to memories so I can learn. Thank you for starting this discussion!

[hazelk]

I don’t do written storyboards. I did make a handwritten clip database for Gilda, breaking the whole movie down into scenes and writing notes on who was in each scene and how they were moving. It took up three sheets of A4 and I barely looked at it while actually making the vid because writing it all down made me commit most of it to memory. It was useful for highlighting scenes with zooms or pans because there weren’t very many.

I storyboard a lot in my head before starting a vid but writing it down feels like work and the ‘board’ changes a lot, it’s very fluid. I usually have a theme or a point or a tagline before embarking on a vid and some idea for the climax (and where that is in the song) the beginning and the end (but the actual images for the beginning and end may change in the making). I think what I do, in effect, is to embed the ‘storyboard’ in the names I give clips. So for Nobody Loves You the clips of Weaver morphing from the urinal were called “pouring” which was the lyric match I was planning to use. Or in Scarlet Ribbons there was a bunch of clips with “atticwoman” in the title that I clipped for possible use in the ‘mad woman in the attic’ section with all the institutionalised slayers. Thinking about it I use similar embedded information for thinking about the song, I mark all the beats and lay down some random clip at the beginning of each section (verse/chorus/instrumentation change) so I can see where they are on the timeline.

[kiki_miserychic]

I love looking at other people's storyboards and notes. It's like looking at how their brain works. It's interesting to see how everyone organizes and views it. I wonder what drives the difference. How we see the source, different learning styles, varying approaches to vidding? The world may never know. :)

I take vid notes and plan in a few different ways. It depends on the project, source, and me.


(Supernatural - used for Choose Life.)

Sometimes I'll print out the lyrics/words and work from them, filling in the clip and episode I want. I don't always do this and I'm not sure what makes me pick one method over another when I'm sourcing. In order to do that I've usually rewatched the source and took notes specific to what I'm vidding.


(Deadwood - used for Special Death)

If it's a series I watch the episodes, take short notes that spark my brain into remembering the clip when I read them. I usually note the time taken from the given episode along with the meta data. If the vid has a wide scope, like an entire series, or if I have a lot of thoughts on it, I'll scribble down notes to remind myself what I wanted to include. This also helps to organize my thoughts. I find the simple act of writing something aligns it in my mind and things fall together easier. Many of the notes don't form into anything useful or just don't work.


(Deadwood - used for Special Death)

For movie vids, the source is generally more limited than a television show. My notes are shorter and more like a map of where things are in the file. It's annoying to want one small clip and have to scrub through a 2 hour movie. It's especially annoying when the movie is edited with fragmented time, like Memento and The Limey. For one vid I took the movie and reordered it linearly, which meant taking notes and then reversing them.


(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - used for Memories Are Made of This)

With movie vids, I don't have as many source notes, just two or three pages to use as a guide.


(The Brøken - used for that brøken day)

There have been times when I've sourced for more than one vid from the same source. I was trying to save rewatch time in the future. I know what clips I'll need for the vid because it's completed in my head. So when I'm sourcing for a current vid, I'll also take down clip notes on the vids I have in my head. I'm drawn to the same kinds of clips, so I pretty much know what I'll use later.


(Supernatural - used for I Want You (She's So Heavy), Choose Life., and future vids)

I tried typing my source notes to use on my laptop, but I didn't like it. I ended up printing them, so I stick with handwriting my notes. A couple times I looked up the sheet music on Bear McCreary's Blog and printed it, making notes about using certain types of clips on certain notes. I abandoned the idea because I started to hate Battlestar Galactica and I think I left the notes on my keyboard, which is buried somewhere in the garage.


(Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - used for Ding! Dong!)

There are also times when I have no notes. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is in the vids themselves.

[imbir]

I am constantly and stupidly agape at how much work other people put into vidding; I start with a clear, general idea and leave the rest to chance and the moment, expecting the vid to take care of itself -- so far, it always has.

Here is my method: I re-watch the source if I haven't recently, I rip it to my hard drive, and then I start tossing likely clips onto the timeline. Here is the end of my method.

I don't storyboard or plan or write anything down; I vid with the parts of my mind I don't know so well, so by the time I have a new document open, I'm behind and trying to catch up. It turns out I have a fairly dependable visual memory when it comes to vidding (as I do for other visual arts) -- though not for facial recognition, orientation or any of the other things one needs to pass as an adult, because I can only be trusted to remember things if I might have to gripe about them -- so I don't use clip databases either, but clip on demand.

(As a point of reference: my writing is even more haphazardous -- I vid linearly but I write at random.)

So far, I've found this to be a very encouraging and permissive system, but then again I've yet to vid anything longer than a mini-series. For a long-running television show I might have to take some precautionary measures, like running each episode through VCL's auto-screencapping feature and perhaps adding keywords to make the whole thing text-searchable, although I found this method misguiding and nullifying when I trialled it in the past.

Here is an excerpt from my one failed attempt at an outline for But a Ghost, which I never looked at again once the vid was in progress (rendered in Fotoflexer because my handwriting looks like a bunch of spiders lined up neatly to die):



For the record, there was an approximately 20% overlap with the final product.

[katta]

Heh, seeing the link to this post I went "...storyboards? I fail as a vidder, don't I?" but that outline thing, yeah, I do that too. I have two columns in a Word document, with the left containing music/lyrics and the right containing clips/characters/scenes I want to use.

Looking at comments below, it would probably be useful to have sheet music available, but how often do I have that?

[heresluck]

I used to use storyboard-outlines that were handwritten notes scribbled on lyrics printouts, but I've moved away from that almost completely. I do always still vid with the lyrics nearby, and I do still make notes, but I've shifted to using a GoogleDocs spreadsheet with three columns: lyrics, ntoes about general theme/mood/character ideas, and notes about specific clips. Notes on paper just started to get way too messy, plus the current system allows me to make notes from anywhere if, for example, I get a good idea during office hours or something.

In general... I was going to say that I do a lot less planning than I used to, but upon reflection I think that's not true; I plan differently, and my plans are much more flexible or open-ended. My advance planning has a lot less to do with specific clip ideas and a lot more to do with 1) the rhetorical effect that I'm after and 2) setting up a system where I can easily find clips that I might want, and then I sort out the details of which clips to use once I'm actually in Premiere.

If I'm vidding long or complex source, or source I don't know well, I still use my clip databases; if I'm vidding more limited source, like a movie or a short season or very specific source (theater clips in S&A, for example), I usually don't bother -- I just dump all the source into Premiere, scrub through it, and sort clips into bins as I go, so then when I think "Hey, I need a shot of Hamlet rehearsal here" I can go look at what I've grabbed and see what looks good in terms of characters, facial expressions, motion, etc.

Detailed storyboarding worked well for me for a long time, but after a while it started to feel limiting; I would make a plan and get really attached to my plan, and then if the plan didn't work I would stall out and sulk, and it would take me forever to let go of the plan and try something different. So I swung the pendulum in the other direction and tried vidding with no plan, totally without a net, just throwing shit on the timeline to see what stuck. At the time I said I'd never do that again, because it was so difficult and felt so alien, so completely at odds with my usual process. But -- weirdly -- it's almost exactly what I did, years later, with Sea Fever, which is the least stressful vid I've ever made.

Mostly, though, I've moved to a sort of hybrid system: a lot of sous chef prep work, some loose planning, a lot of experimenting. By keeping the plan more general but having more information at my disposal, I free myself up to be more spontaneous while actually laying clips; I'm more open to serendipitous accidents, and I find it easier to let go of ideas that aren't working, to junk a clip and try something else in its place. This is important, because my vidding time is more limited than ever and a lot of my ideas turn out to not work; I don't have time anymore to stall out and have a meltdown every time I do something ill-advised.

[thuviaptarth]

I knew you had put up something! I just couldn't find it because I was looking at the wrong entries. ::sigh:: Weren't tags supposed to solve all my troubles?

[thuviaptarth]

I love you for putting up a wealth of different kinds of images. ♥

[heresluck]

I don't know about solving all your troubles, but they ARE tagged, FWIW.

[thuviaptarth]

I know! I just couldn't find them anyway.

[luminosity]

What an interesting post! I love seeing others' storyboards. I don't "storyboard" per se anymore. I tried to do it, and I found myself unable to think outside of what I had already put down on paper (or screen, whatever). What I do now seems to be a combination of kiki_miserychic's lyrics sheets and piles of sticky notes. I still have a "Choose Life" lyrics/notes when I made the Spike version. Looks just like her SPN notes. :)

I do tend to obsess about the vid so much that it's practically vidded in my head before I even start laying clips on the timeline, and I talk it out a lot. When I do start writing things down, it's a weird shorthand of clip identifiers and time codes.

Ooh I missed this post!

[ravenholdt]

Sry for the lateness.

Like yhlee, I usually outline instead of storyboarding. This generally consists of 1 to 4 pages of scribbled and annotated time-indexes and notes. I never "see" the vid in my head - I see a flowchart much like a story synopsis.

I usually work fast and use many MANY clips, so my vidding style is fairly liquid/avant garde. I prefer to be spontaneous, and if I dont like what Ive done, then I change it.
I sit down with a goal ("Lets get that second verse done), and then Im off until either I've garnered a good 30 to 40 seconds of vid. At which point, I begin adding FX and deciding on transitions and fades.
I do use a lot of overlays - the scenes for those generally come to me in tandem.
I rarely ever write down exactly what scene Im using - usually the ep and scene in question just springs to mind.

Now that Ive said that, let me say that my current project is fully plotted, with the exception of actual screencaps and such.
And its still a written account, no table, nothing but the place in the music, the scene, what ep its from, where i go from there.

So Im a bare-bones planning gal, I guess.

It feels wrong to say that, because although nothing is ever down for OTHERS to see, in my mind the vids are fully fleshed and constantly being adjusted.

Re: Ooh I missed this post!

[ravenholdt]

meant to say "either Ive garnered.....or Im exhausted." lol

YES!

[ravenholdt]

"I do tend to obsess about the vid so much that it's practically vidded in my head before I even start laying clips on the timeline, and I talk it out a lot. When I do start writing things down, it's a weird shorthand of clip identifiers and time codes. "

Exactly!

Re: Ooh I missed this post!

[ravenholdt]

By the way, here's a small sample of what I usually do when vidding (from my latest finished vid):

Song: You Complete Me

1:11 - cut scene
1:39 - Shirtless Mal (@1.25sp)

*River scenes of spying, drifting, lost

:47 apparition Simon
1:04-:05 A/R
2:58 - face to face

cc.sttings - F1.14 S0.500 x.857 y.643
2:18-2:19 R a/r
3:34 on - "Just one Touch" SHOW IT

1:14 - f/in rescue me

Theres about 1 and a half pages of this - just random scribbled notes and adjustments to whats already in my head. (Can you tell that Im not a linear thinker? lol)
Hope it helps, but probably not lol.

[thuviaptarth]

I am of the "disk space is cheap!" point of view.

Generally I am of this mind, but my conviction keeps getting tested! ::looks ruefully at 3 nearly full external drives (2 500GB, 1 1TB):: But I am terrified of trying to vid without having all the source easily available to scan; I depend heavily on being able to return to it and find something I missed before.

[thuviaptarth]

I admire your AE speak! I am but an apprentice. For one project I broke a sequence down into individual layers and effects by writing it up, but I don't think I ever had anything as precise as your delay and percentage numbers.

[thuviaptarth]

I've always wanted to see what "storyboarding" meant in vidding, because people talk about it all the time, but I've never known what to do/how to do it.

It looks like it's not much like film storyboarding for most people. "Outlining" is probably a more accurate term.

When I vid, it's basically because I start to see it in my head as the song plays and it's a like a pressure building in my head so I have to start it to make it go away. I vid more by... instinct, I guess you'd say? Sometimes I have the lyrics in a word document and make notes as to what type of thing I want to have happening where, but this is more the exception than the norm.

I have tried to do this for sections of some vids to see how it comes out. I am always wondering if the way other people vid might work better for me than my current one.

[thuviaptarth]

writing it all down made me commit most of it to memory. It was useful for highlighting scenes with zooms or pans because there weren’t very many.

This, rather than the actual clips, is probably the most useful thing preclipping scenes does for me.

I storyboard a lot in my head before starting a vid but writing it down feels like work and the ‘board’ changes a lot, it’s very fluid.

For me writing it down is play -- I have to stop myself from doing it to procrastinate the clipping. I don't feel wedded to the board; I just like having it as a reference if I'm stuck. Sometimes I have to throw it out.

I am so fascinated that you find lyric match labeling helpful! Every time I've tried that it's ended up a disaster. I remember things best when I label them by imagery.

[thuviaptarth]

Heh, seeing the link to this post I went "...storyboards? I fail as a vidder, don't I?"

No no no! Whatever works for you works for you. I am just fascinated by ways other people do it because I wonder if there's a better or more efficient way to do things than I do. (Sadly, I suspect efficiency and creativity are orthogonal if not mutually exclusive. I need some order to do things but I also need some mess.)

[thuviaptarth]

It turns out I have a fairly dependable visual memory when it comes to vidding (as I do for other visual arts)

This seems to be one of the key points that effects how much written | typed | drawn pre-planning people do.

[lim]

*grins*

I fear your AE admiration is misplaced! I almost certainly copied and pasted those expressions from some tutorial I was reading or something.

[thedothatgirl.livejournal.com]

I guess I outline rather than story board but there is planning of sorts.

I re watch the source again unless it is an entire series, but then I am generally familiar anyhow.

Rip and clip all potential scenes/episodes if I haven't already got them on the HD.

I use a print of the lyrics sheet to scribble notes against particular lines/words/phrases. They may include the numbering system for my clips (Season/episode/chpt) or just character names/events etc. These tend to be the scenes that initially came to mind when hearing the song/music. There will be pages and pages of other notes after I watch the ripped source clips again.

If it is an instrumental piece then I will create a sheet with timings and descriptions of sounds & instruments (in purely lay man terms) which I will use like 'lyrics' sheet.