Reflection and Evaluation - Storyboard/Treatment

My latest creative media assignment involved developing a storyline and creating a genre film treatment and storyboard from this.

One of the things which took me quite a while was the actual creation of my storyline. I couldn't decide what type of film to make, although I did know that I wanted either a comedy or a horror film. Originally, I was going to make a rewrite of the fairy tale snow white. I created a draft of the storyline, but I decided that I didn't want to continue with the story. I decided instead that I wanted to create a horror film and then build the suspense to a climax, where it turns out that the 'scary' thing or the protagonist is not scary at all. I also had difficulty when creating my storyboards because I am not very good at drawing and the end result consisted of basic stick figures.

My final film was about a girl who arrives at school one day and finds it abandoned. She doesn't understand why no one was at school, and after being increasingly worried at scared, it turns out that the entire school was just waiting to throw a surprise party for her. The aim with this film, is to build up suspense, and keep building the suspense up until the resolution, when everything anticlimaxes.

Planning and research helped me with the assignment because I had a better understanding of what was necessary. I researched the horror genre and looked at the different elements which make the genre unique. I created a genre recipe about the horror genre. In class, we also looked at different storyboards and discussed what was needed to have effective storyboards. We did the same with treatments, analyzing the different aspects and what we had to do.

I planned out my treatment in dot points before I started, to try and give myself an idea of what to do before I actually started. We also looked at lots of different things in class, different bits a pieces, such as synopsis' and short clips of these. I attempted (Not very well) to use perspective when drawing my storyboards. I had never done this before, however, and the result was not as desired.

One of the class pieces we looked at was a synopsis from the film 'The Prestige'. We then discussed this as a class, watching the relevant snippet of the film and comparing the ideas and the differences from the treatment and our interpretation, to how it actually looked. The storyboard template I used for the assignment was the standard one provided for all students on blackboard. It was a good template, and allowed me to effectively show what I wanted and include all the relevant pieces of information.

During the unit, surprisingly, I have improved upon my limited drawing ability. I now have an idea about how to draw in perspective, whch I didn't know anything about before. Prior to this task, I had no idea how to do a storyboard or treatment. I knowknow how to do both of these things. I know how to set them out and how to write about each section and each shot. This will be very useful for the rest of my creative media schooling, as well as any other film industry I might do.



I am satisfied with my finished product, although there are some areas that I know could use improvement. I managed my time quite effectively, more so with the treatment than the storyboards. I finished by treatments very early, and I was over confidet and left my storyboarding a little late. Having said this, I didn't leave the task to the night before and finished it on time. If I did this task over again, I would like to work on the layout of my storyboards. The storyboards were not overly neat (limited drawing ability) but I thik I could have improved the set out a bit and taken more time on each individual drawing. If I did the entire task over, I would spend more time planning and reserarchng to make sure that I knew exactly what I was doing before I actually started.