Q. How could my original storyboard helped me prepare as a production designer?

Q. How could my original storyboard helped me prepare as a production designer?

Storyboards play one of the most important roles in production design. They transform one's ideas into images and allow the film crew, including actors / actresses, camera operators, and most importantly those who are involved in the production design process, to have visual ideas of how the final film would look like. Even though they are just a guideline and the final film would never look exactly like the storyboards, it helps different members of the film crew, such as the costume designer and the set designer, with preparing for the shoots. In my group's production, I was responsible for creating the storyboard. The final film is now completed, and when I review the storyboards, I think that many changes could have been made and they would have improved our film. 

In the first storyboard draft, instead of getting shot by a gun, the character was shot in the shoulder by an arrow. Our group realised that it would be very difficult to recreate that scene, and therefore, we decided to change the arrow to a gun bullet. In the final storyboards that I created, I drew the background set for the auditorium scenes and overall, more details could have been shown in the storyboards. Considerations such as: How do we create the huge background set? How do make sure that the colours of the costumes won't clash with the ones in the background? could have been made. Storyboards can help us organise ourselves and give us an idea of what costumes or props we need, however, I only completed the storyboards around a week before our first shoot, and I think that is the major reason why we were not prepared for our shoots. We often forgot to bring certain props, as we did not have enough time to get everything we wanted. Some props and set dressing, such as the map and the background set for the auditorium, ended up looking not very realistic or 'Western' in our film. For the Stanley beach scenes, I did not draw much of the background in the storyboards, causing our location set to not look like a desert at all. It was one of the major flaws in our film, as you can see modern buildings, cars and even the ocean in the frame. I think that we could have put fake cactuses or rocks on the beach, so that it would appear more desert-like.  

In conclusion, I think that there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the storyboards. One of the major improvement would be showing more details for the location background, as the location set is one of the main aspects of the film's mise en scene. After producing our film, I realised how important storyboards are. I would definitely put more effort into the storyboards for our next project.