Storyboards

What is the purpose of a storyboard?

Without a storyboard, we as a group have nothing visual to reference to when we undertake our music video production. Each box in our storyboard consisted of a shot we would like to include within our final video, which thus determines which shots we should capture during the imperative filming process. The central purpose creating storyboards serves is to determine a logical order for the shots to appear in within the music video. Storyboards are not only used in music videos but in films and advertisements too which enables the people creating it a clear vision of what to capture and how each shot has its purpose to fulfil. Therefore, this makes us as a group aware that we must make decisions from the start of the storyboard process including how information should be split effectively and how it should be represented to the target audience. Overall, the storyboarding process is a very important one as it allows us to adopt an even clearer idea of what we would like to be included within the video and how each and every group member can involve themselves within each process to ensure we do not waste valuable production/editing time too. By creating a storyboard it also allows us to think of additional ideas which could ultimately improve the video, thus becoming more of a 'hit'/success within our chosen target audience of young females who enjoy music of the Indie genre (acoustic guitar supporting meaningful lyrics sung softly and full of emotional meaning/presenting memories/opinions) 

 How did you use your primary and secondary research that you carried out, to plan your music video?

Referring to our primary and secondary research has enabled us to adopt more of a detailed vision for our storyboards than we originally had. Conducting a combination of primary and secondary research from a variety of sources allows us as a collective to consider our target audience throughout. This is something which is of high importance to us as it will be our target audience which determines the feedback we receive, thus having a profound effect on the overall success of our creative production. By having our target audience on our mind through all processes (production in addition to planning) continuously, it will have a huge effect on the cinematography we capture and the way in which we chose to edit our footage. All individual elements from things as small as iconography to lighting must be appropriate for our target audience to recognise and enjoy as without that crucial component; our video shows no purpose/explores nothing relevant.  The secondary research we conducted into our chosen artist has especially assisted us throughout the storyboard planning and production process as we as a group were able to identify which features commonly appear in their videos for example a guitar is used in all of Nina Nesbitt's music videos as it not only has the literal meaning of the guitar in use throughout performances but enables the audience to recognise the Indie genre in addition to being highly conventional to traditional Indie videos too. This therefore allows us to think effectively into which elements we can incorporate within our video which will hopefully benefit our production as a whole.

 How did you and your group storyboard your music video?

We created a storyboard for our music video by combining each others ideas after repeatedly listening to our chosen song. Because we wanted to follow Goodwin's theory of the lyrics being parallel to the visuals, we kept this in mind whilst creating our paper storyboards for example when

* refer to image *

How did you share the responsibility?

After a detailed discussion, we decided we had a joint vision about what we would like our production to look like which was echoed onto our paper storyboard collection.
We shared the responsibility equally by assigning one person to draw, one person to colour and two people to write the correct information regarding camera shot type, iconography needed etc.

   Did you follow your storyboards, or did you make changes?

We followed most of our storyboard as we shared a group primary vision of what we wanted our final outcome to look like. For example, from the start we knew that the first 4 seconds of the song are struts on the guitar before the artists vocals are introduced. This allowed us time to present the misguided theme before the lyrics started to tell the story which consisted of a combination of shots to signify different emotions experienced by the artists love interest (what and who she is signing about) Initially, we also knew that we wanted a fairly simple performance to be shown throughout. This consisted of just the artist and her guitar performing in front of the camera and a plain white wall which acted as a conventional background for our chosen genre: Indie.


We felt it was important to follow conventions of the genre from the start therefore applied many characteristics onto our paper storyboard.