Storyboards Can Save A Filmmaker’s Life
Writer/Director/Producer Joe Badon: When working with 13 days and like $8,000, you are talking about just a few hundred dollars a day that you have for everything you’re doing. And so you don’t have time to do pick-ups, you don’t have time to set up a shot once you get there. You need to make sure you know exactly what you’re going to be doing that day.
So when I go to finishing the script…I’m an illustrator. That’s what I did for a long, comic books and children’s books and I did storyboards for movies and I saw the importance of getting the storyboards down so that when you get to the set, you’re not wasting time.
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I storyboarded the entire script from the very first shot to the very last shot. And I knew it was going to be important. But I didn’t realize how important it was until once we got there. So my first AD Aria Mickenberg was able to open up the book, look at the shot we needed and say “We need this shot” and we go “Okay, let’s set up the shot.” Dan Waghorne our DP, sets the shot up, sets the lights up, shoots it, we do a red circle around that… “What’s the next shot?” Right here, right in front of us because we have the storyboard illustrated.
And that was far and above a huge, important piece of the puzzle to get the movie done in time, on budget and finished without having to go back and go “Oh…we totally forgot this shot!” Now we have to find the location again and find the actors again and set up this time. We didn’t have to do that because we looked at the the storyboards and we had finished it all.
Editor, Joseph Estrade: I didn’t expect to walk into the first meeting of the film and immediately know what the film was going to look like in the end (which was very important). And now that I am editing the film, I don’t really know what I would have done without it because every time I go into a scene, the first thing I do is look at all the storyboards to get a feeling for what Joe wants out of the scene. And knowing that, having that backbone, that structure, allows me to kind of branch off of it and to build off of it and to be more creative because I can allocate more of my mind and my time to the little details as opposed to the backbone structure.
Cinematographer, Daniel Waghorne: I think the storyboards are one of the most important parts of making sure this film got made on time. I mean we shot 90 pages in 13 days, which was kind of insane and I just remember the first time that we were presented with storyboards, I looked at this and said “This is going to make my job a million times easier.”The movie was basically already made and all we had to do was just get in there and actually shoot it and even though we did change up a few things here or there, at least we still had the foundation of everything already built. So I was able to see exactly what Joe wanted to make and that made everybody’s life a hundred times easier.
Question for the Viewers: Do you storyboard?
About the Filmmakers:
Joe Badon has been a full time freelance illustrator and storyboard artist since 2008. He is the writer, director and producer of the full length surreal thriller The God Inside My Ear. This is his first film project.
Joseph Estrade attained a B.A. in Film from UNO in 2014. He worked as an editor for various ad agencies and is currently a freelance videographer, timelapse photographer and editor for films, tv shows, weddings, commercials, music videos, and various other content. “The God Inside My Ear” is Joseph’s first full feature editing project.
Daniel Waghorne is a Cinematographer and professional Drone Pilot from New Orleans. His film making career started on the documentary field, traveling throughout Africa, India, and Guatemala creating media content for missionaries and non-profits. His love for cinematography grew exponentially over those years, and he enjoys creating all forms of narrative film and having fun on every set he can shoot on.
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