Storyboards and Timelines and Dictaphones - Oh My!

Timeline illustration, Storyboard draft, and Dictaphone.
Photograph by Kelly Guerreri.

We're pressing onward with our plans for filming our short documentaries. On Monday, we faced menacing blank storyboards, challenged to fill them with notes on the visuals, commentary, and sounds of our film. The time for organization had arrived. We filled twelve frames in our storyboard - a lot to fit in for a three minute film! After we finished our designs, we presented them to our instructors and classmates for feedback. With their feedback, we modified our plans.

Tuesday was the real thing: we pitched our film idea to the Yorkshire Museum. Their response? - "Go ahead!" Natalie McCaul suggested we consider adding music and special effects to our film to liven up the historical approach. She also expressed some concern over its length. We realized that where we had planned for interviews we would have to search for soundbites. Now we knew that, in our interview debriefing, we would have to emphasise our time constraints and make it clear we needed compact information. We're still trying to think of how to say, "Please give us soundbites and not your full career experience" without unintentionally sounding insulting...

Our voiceover script and a draft of pawprints
on our timeline. Photograph by Kelly Guerrieri.

One of the ideas Claire Price (one of our instructors) had was to focus on "John Moore's dog", a quirky bit of history we used to liven up our timeline. On her suggestion, we included an illustration of a dog in each of Jenna's timeline pictures. We found that the inclusion of the illustrated dog adds a relatable element as well as something that holds the attention of the viewer during the explanation of the timeline. Whilst playing with the timeline pictures and the camera today we developed further ways of how to utlise the theme of the dog throughout the timeline:

* Instead of arrows to link the events of the timeline together, we will use drawings of paw prints which we will film being drawn and then speed up during the editing process.
* We will also film Jenna's hand adding colour and dates to the timeline drawings as we focus on each one.
* Sound effects will bring each illustration to life; today, we found a website that allows us to access and use sound effects without copyright infringement.
* The dog will guide us through the timeline, and we will introduce each illustration by first focusing on the dog and hearing a dog bark.

Emma Carr recording the timeline voiceovers, and Jenna
Tinning sorting the audio files on the computer. Photograph
by Kelly Guerrieri.

Today, we finalised our plans for filming our interviews, shots and pictures. We also set our timeline voiceover script and recorded it using a dictaphone. Emma's lovely Yorkshire vocals will narrate our finished film. Kelly is in charge of technology, and she had a lot of fun experimenting with the video camera and dictaphone!

Since filming begins tomorrow, we assigned specific roles to our team. Emma will interview our experts and perform sound checks; Jenna will direct the film and draw the timeline pictures, and Kelly will be the cameragirl and technology figure-out-er. Everyone is very happy with their roles, and we're looking forward to the creative process!