Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie will examine the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here.

"12.5 Seconds Later ...", a Jamie Stuart film

One very obvious manner in which technology has altered filmmaking is in the visualization process. Some directors (Hitchcock, Spielberg, the Coens) are well-known for incorporating storyboards into their process; others (Kubrick, Cronenberg, Malick) prefer to reserve their decision-making until they're on the set. With regard to the former group's approach, hand-drawn boards aside, modern pre-visualization probably dates back to Francis Ford Coppola's blue screen experiments in the early-'80s while working on The Outsiders and Rumble Fish; now, with the aid of programs like Maya and Motion Builder, filmmakers can prepare their pictures through computer generated animation down to the exact frame (explored in great detail on the DVDs for Panic Room and War of the Worlds, among others).

I started out as a strict storyboarder, going so far as to design my own template pages for different screen aspect ratios. In fast-shooting no-budget situations it's of the utmost importance to be as well-prepared as possible. I've been saved countless times because of storyboards -- in particular, a short I created called Triumph of the Will, Part II, which was shot in two different segments three months apart. As I've moved further into the world of digital filmmaking, I've found myself using fewer and fewer boards. This is, in part, because much of the work I direct is fast-breaking and improvised, but it's also the result of feeling more comfortable making decisions on the spot. For instance, last year, I created a short called 12.5 Seconds Later... as part of a test drive of Apple's Final Cut Studio 2. With only one week to prepare before I had to shoot it, I tried to storyboard as much as possible -- and this was important because the short featured a great deal of VFX compositing.

Unfortunately, I only got half of it storyboarded before the shoot -- and those boards consisted entirely of the first half before the FX entered into the narrative. This situation proved a decent testing ground for whether or not the boards even mattered. They did and they didn't. One of the things I like about drawing shots ahead of time is that I have time to think -- I can work out visual themes and even come up with complex ideas that I might not conceive of in a rushed improvisation. It's like creating 3-dimentional space inside your head, space without time that you can move around in and find the proper angles and movements. By using this approach, I came up with several interesting boom and dolly maneuvers. For the non-boarded section, while filming the exterior FX backgrounds and templates, I realized quickly that often 2-3 shots would be needed to sell a concept. Often, I'd start wide to set the scene, then go medium as the effect was set up, then into close-up for the effect itself. By improvising all of this, I often over-covered things which gave me a bit of breathing room in post. That was good because if I had stuck rigidly to storyboards and something didn't work with the FX, there wouldn't have been many other choices than to do re-shoots. One other positive for that particular shoot, as well as everything I've shot in 720p (and this goes for most people who shoot digital), is that because I'm shooting directly as digital files, I can play each shot back immediately.

If I don't like the way something looks, there's no waiting for the film dailies to arrive: I just re-shoot right then and there. Also, because there's no time lost digitizing the footage from tape, as in mini-DV, I can put together rough cuts right on the set to see how everything is fitting together. Overall, I'm stuck in the middle on pre-vis at this point. I can get by without it, but depending on the circumstances of the shoot, I do think they're good to have. And just because you have them doesn't mean you need to stick to them.