Group Storyboard - Miss Miller

Group Storyboard

After creating individual storyboards, we then compared our ideas and took the best ones to create a group storyboard. The purpose of a group storyboard is to give the other member's of the group a chance to look at each others ideas and to see if we had done anything different to each other. We could then also decide if their ideas incorporated elements that were better than our own. Due to our previous group meetings, we all had similar looking individual storyboards which made it easier to put together a group one. We all knew how we wanted the sequence to look, however for some of the frames we had used different camera techniques, or gone into more detail on the sounds and edits that we had planned to use. For example, Molly's storyboard was the longest out of all three as she used more frames and camera shots to show the audience the build up to the death of the antagonist at the beginning of the sequence. In her second frames she decided to use a medium shot to show them a side view of the antagonist dragging his chair through the school corridor, whereas Jake and I only used our first frame to give the audience a long shot of the antagonist walking towards the camera. We decided to use the frames that Molly had created as we thought it would prolong the sequence and make the audience wait longer in anticipation for the scene to finish. Also, during the frame that would show the audience a close up of the antagonists face right before he killed himself, I thought it would work best if there was no sound as this might distract the audience from what they are watching, and also the silence would emphasise his death due to the sudden sound of the chair hitting the floor shocking the audience and making them more aware of what has just happened. Whereas Molly wanted to have a low, eerie sound playing quietly throughout. We agreed that during the editing stage we would watch the sequence using both of our ideas to see which one works best.

This was our finalised group storyboard:

Together as a group we looked over our three individual storyboards before creating a group storyboard by using what we thought were the best frames from each. Overall, our group storyboard contains 24 frames, is set in three different locations and is around 2 minutes 20 seconds long. The group storyboard is much longer then our individual storyboards as we went into more detail in each of the frames. Frames 1 to 8 are set in the school, and show the build up to the suicide of our antagonists. We kept with the idea to have an enigma at the very beginning of the sequence as we are the only group with this idea and so we hope it will hook the audience. Frames 9 to 18 are set in the house and show the build up to the death of the mother. Frame 14 will be a blank screen as this follows the camera zooming in on our antagonists eyes, which he will then shut which we hope will surprise the audience. Similarly, frame 19 will be the title of our thriller film, "Disturbia" and will be accompanied by the chorus of the song "tiptoe round the tulips" taken from the film Insidious. Finally, frames 20 to 24 are set at the bus stop near Chigwell station. These will be the most difficult frames to film as we will have no control over the light outside, therefore we will have to try and film all of the frames on the same day as we cannot be sure that if we film the frames on different days that the lighting will be the same. To solve this problem we agreed that we could potentially use edits on the footage to keep the lighting the same throughout. Molly's individual storyboard was the most detailed out of the three as she often expanded her frames to sometimes show the audience the same shot but from different angles. There were only a few times during the group planning that we needed to make compromises on the camera shots we were going to use, for example, for the dinner scene, Molly had planned to use Point of view (POV) shots to show the audience what the antagonist was looking at. I, on the other hand wanted to use a close up shot to give them a better understanding of how he was feeling which would help to build tension due to the audience feeling as though the mother was in danger. As a compromise, we decided that we were going to start the frame with a close up of his facial expressions and then follow this with a zoom out to show the audience the bigger picture and include the knife in the shot.

I think our group storyboard is detailed and clearly shows how we want our opening sequence to look after we have finished filming. It was easy for us to do as we noticed after looking over our individual storyboards that someone of our frames were visually similar which made it easier to finalise our group storyboard. For example, the first frame of our antagonist walking towards the camera dragging a chair behind him was the same idea for all three individual storyboards. We all had the same beginning frame in mind for how we wanted it to look. We used the second frame in the group storyboard to show the antagonist walking from a side view as Molly had used two frames in her individual storyboard to prolong the sequence. If we could create the storyboard again we would try to incorporate more of Jakes ideas into our final one, but his individual storyboard was the least detailed and contained most of the ideas that mine and Molly's had together.