When I produced and directed my first film I wrote the script and it turned out to be a simple 5 page script. I thought that there was no need to storyboard. I could imagine all the shots in my head. I had heard about some of these storyboarding programs but never thought that I needed them. However, upon editing my first short film, “So, A Guy Walks Into A Bar” which ran 9 minutes long, I found out why storyboarding is so essential to filmmaking.

Can you do without doing storyboards? The quick answer is “yes”. What you must take into consideration though is that without doing a storyboard, you will most likely need to get the entire cast back to film the parts that you just didn’t think of while planning the shoot. This exact thing happened to me. I captured my footage and started editing. “WHAT THE HECK!?” I had parts that were completely non-continuous that looked completely awful. As I was editing I had to start writing down notes on which scenes that I had forgotten to film! They were little small incidentals that I had not even thought of and most were transition shots that make the film flow easier to the viewer. For example I had shot a scene where my main character, played by R. Michael Paquette, was driving home from work and stopped at the bar on his way home. I got the shot of him driving to the bar and then he asked me “Where should I park? The spot that we were going to park is taken.” I told him where to park and I resumed filming. He pulled into the parking spot and put his truck into Park. Then he called his wife to tell him that he had to work late. Now in my mind, this was the footage I needed. As I started editing I noticed that after I cut out the piece where he asked me where to park, there was a HUGE gap in the scene and it didn’t flow easy. I needed a “pick up shot” of him pulling into the parking spot from outside of the truck to fill into the gap. If I would have storyboarded, then I would have never needed to recall the cast and film another shot.

Do you need a software program? Another quick answer is “no”. You do not need it. You can write on a piece of paper and make really bad drawings even, and it will work just fine. What you get when you start to use the software programs is ease of use. Just like the screenwriting software. There are two types of programs; static image programs and 3D “pre-vis” programs. If you are a watcher of special features on DVDs you might have seen some of the “making of” features and might have seen them do something called “pre-vis”. This stands for Pre-Visualization.

A good 3D storyboarding program is called FrameForge 3D Studio. This is a little more expensive than the Storyboard Quick program but less expensive than the Storyboard Artist program. This program also allows you to do basic “pre-vis” storyboards. This will allow you to visually see zooms, pans, tracks, and the cast moving right on the screen. This program doesn’t allow you to save actual moving pictures but just snapshots. I’ve recently purchased this program. I really like the interface. It’s fairly intuitive and it’s relatively easy to create your sets and arrange the objects within the sets. I did notice that it is a little slow on the processing. Simply moving an object (person or place) from one spot to another takes quite a while. I’m sure that the reason why it is so slow is that because it is 3D and the computer must arrange all of these objects and it stresses on the computer’s resources. Two things I really liked about FrameForge3D are that it is very fast to render your images, and the other is that the manual is probably the best manual I’ve ever read for any piece of software. You can tell that the company really put forth the effort to support its users and write such a great manual. Overall, I really enjoy the program and don’t regret purchasing it for a single second. I do hope that they may be able to come up with some more speedy algorithms for future releases though.

Visit http://frameforge3d.com/download.php for a downloadable demo of the program.