An example of a split-shot film

For the characters in famous movies, we were shocked by their early conceptual art. What would they look like if fate pointed in another direction?

It is one thing to imagine a character on paper, but it is a brand-new attempt to describe a series of actions as the skeleton of the finished film. In the storyboard, oral description can't convey the director's intention. As Josh Sheppard, the storyboard maker of Hellboy 2, pointed out, "This job is very difficult". But in the end, it presents amazing works of art, with some shadows of early movie characters and famous movie scene renderings.

watcher

Storyboard Artist: Zack Snyder

Tomorrow's empire of 007

Storyboard Artist: Martin Asbury

The birds

Storyboard Artist: Harold Michelson

gladiator

Storyboard Artist: sylvain Despratz

Star Wars

Storyboard Artist: joe johnston

So first of all, we need to know, what is a split shot?

On the basis of the script, the director divides the story into different scenes, angles, sound and picture forms, lens relationships and so on. According to his general idea, it is equivalent to the text workbook of the visual image of the future film. Later shooting and production are basically based on storyboards, so it is also called directing scripts or workstations.

Storyboard is the director's overall grasp and design of concreteness in the transformation from literary image to visual image, which can reflect the style characteristics of director's creation.

The content of storyboard generally includes the number of shots, scenes, shooting methods, length, content (referring to actions, lines, scene scheduling, environment modeling in a shot), sound, music and so on. , listed in a unified table.

It can be said that it is the shooting plan and blueprint of the film.

The use of shot sketches (storyboards) may have started with Walter Disney's first cartoon. Weber Smith is an animator in Disney. He invented the storyboard in the early 1930s. However, even without Disney's influence, the close relatives of comics and storyboards had taken root among most Americans in the 1930s. The concept that movies can be visualized with a single drawing board has become an inevitable development result.

Hitchcock is perhaps the best director at storyboards. He used elaborate graphics cards to decorate his videos and controlled the shooting process to ensure that his initial ideas could be completely transformed into movies. His hand-painted perspective "North by Northwest" has now become a must-read manual for many filmmakers to watch and learn. For Hitchcock, who was an artist, this is also a way to confirm that he is a film creator. He often says that his films have been finished before they are made. We can prove that he seldom looks at the viewfinder at the scene, because the scene is just equivalent to a storyboard, which has already been completed.

In Hollywood, almost every movie has a special storyboard production team. From the early silent films to the current blockbusters, the production of storyboards is an essential part of the film preparation. According to the script and storyboard drawn by the director, after the basic composition of the picture and the time of moving the mirror are prepared in detail, the film starts shooting, and the director can arrange shooting according to almost every picture. However, in China, due to the lack of funds, the lens analyzer industry has gradually begun to emerge in recent years. Generally speaking, it is the films of great directors that pay for film splitters. Some films with small investment, the director can draw, the director can draw, and the director can't draw, so let the photographer draw.

The function of the splitting mirror mainly has several purposes:

First, he allows film creators to show their ideas in advance, and like writers, they develop their ideas through constant revision;

Secondly, it can be used as the best language to exchange ideas with members of the overall production team.

The spread value of split mirror will increase because of the complexity of production, but it is not limited to action scenes and high-cost production. Even small-scale and dramatic movies can benefit from storyboards.

But the most obvious limitation of storyboard is that it can't express motion, not only in the picture, but also in the camera. In addition, there are optical effects beyond the performance range of storyboards, such as overlapping, fading in and out, and the manipulation of depth of field and focus. The most direct way is to use words and sketches to describe things that cannot be drawn.