Storyboarding by Peter Jackson

This video offers a look in to the pre-production process Peter Jackson undergoes before shooting a film. For the first five minutes of the YouTube video, there is a focus on storyboarding, which relates to my role as storyboarder for our first group video. Peter Jackson draws up his own storyboards, and explains how in essence he is creating a cheap take of the movie. Through photographing the frames and creating an animatic, the storboard becomes a way of visually communicating the director's vision to the cast and crew. By the time the detailed storyboard is finished, shaded and animated, in essence the director has a visual representation of what the film could look like. Generally, his storyboards seem to show composition, and rough directions for the actors. For example, at 4:30 on the video we see directional arrows used to indicate movement.

Interestingly though, the interviewees in the video explain how Jackson does not fully commit to the storyboard, and allows change if he feels something will work better when filming. When we filmed our first project, some of the shots were difficult to achieve such as the POV shot of the book being held. Instead an over the shoulder shot was used when we were filming on location. Also, through the editing process clips may be dropped or scaled down, proving that the storyboard acts as a guide and not as a strict set of instructions.

In conclusion, it seems that the storyboarder's role is to take a vision and re-produce it on paper so that it can be passed around and understood by others. The storyboard is a rough sketch of the final vision, allowing people to begin to see the artistic direction of the film that is being produced.