The Storyboard & Excluded Shots

Our pre-production storyboard was a very rough summary-based series of drawings that represented the main sequences of our video. We followed the basic intention of the dance-performance and the angles of shots from our storyboard. However, during filming we were presented with props and sets we never thought of using and other facilities such as lights and reflectors that gave us further ideas for narrative, and other creative sequences that we previously hadn’t thought about. Our final piece has a lot more artistic flare and substance to our initial intentions illustrated on the storyboard drawings. It was also difficult to visualise the timing of shots and their layering through just drawings, as only editing facilities during post-production gave us the ability to experiment and computer graphically alter the shots.

We filmed shots of our dancers on a ladder which was drawn in the original pre-production storyboard, but we chose not to use these shots as they made the video appear amateur and they ultimately didn’t ‘fit in’ with our unusual, supernatural theme. They also appeared too cliche once watched back in editing, and seemed like a tacky imitation of common pop videos (right).

For the same reason, we didn’t shoot one of our performers taking a biscuit from a tin as it would have made the lyrics “caught red handed in the biscuit tin” too obvious and literal. Instead we synched a shot of a hand dropping nails in reverse to emphasise the lyric "caught".

Furthermore, we shot, as planned, blood dripping down a plain background but found it more effective at the time of shooting to pour the blood over a black mannequin to emphasise the lyrics “you killed a man” as the way that Imogen sings this line is hard to understand. Josh and I also incorporated shots that we didn’t initially draw on the storyboard such as our performer in the forest with red and white fabric as well as our performers tied to a tree, with a mirror, a magnifying glass and a camera. By incorporating shots that weren’t initially planned the video became more diverse and we were able to create a discreet narrative instead of leaving the video with an absence of narrative.