Story boarding process

Before starting to create our horror trailer my group and I had to first storyboard how the trailer would play out and how we would show of our film (e.g. showing off the best bits or key scenes). When deciding how the trailer should play out, we had to look at other horror trailers and how they are structured and the techniques they used, after observing various horror trailer (e.g. Grave Encounters, Woman in black, Jeepers creepers 3 etc) we could see that the majority of them used very fast edits with a large variety of shots (roughly 60 for just a minute and a half), fades and text appearing during action sequences. Also it was interesting to see that a lot of the time the trailer weren't shown in a linear fashion (they didn't tell the story from beginning to end) which was mainly because the trailer was to show off the best bits of the film. 


The first stage of creating the storyboards was to highlight the key scenes in our narrative that should be shown in our trailer since they are what we thought to be the best scene and would entice the audience to see the film. After selecting the 10 best scenes we had to decide how they should play out so that it follows the structure of most trailer (i.e showing the narrative in a way that gives the audience a general overview of the plot without giving to much away). This was one of the more difficult step through out the entire process since there were various different ways in which we could portray our narrative and everyone in the group had the own opinion/idea of how the trailer should be structured, plus even though we were heavily influenced by other horror trailers we didn't want to copy them completely and show a lack of originality.


The next step was to decide on each shot that would be used within out trailer. For this exercise the other members of my group were responsible for deciding what the should be in each shot as well as the music/dialogue, the camera movement/edit, and the description of each shot as well as the reason for this type of shot. My job was to draw out each shot based on the description given by my other team members, in total we came up with around 60 shots that would be used in the trailer though admittedly we have may have to create more in case those shots don't fill up the necessary time gap or just aren't enough to make the trailer seem compelling enough. 


Finally I had to draw out each shot. When creating the trailers I had to use quite a lot of template images from the internet in order to draw out how they should look since a lot of the characters movements were from different angles and it's difficult to draw these type of actions from memory. I got the template images from the internet and it made it much easier for me to draw the images accurately, also I had to go over all of my pencil drawings in black fine-liner pen so that I could scan them into the computer and save them as JPEG images so that we had back ups of the images just in case something happened to the originals.