Filmmaking: Creating and Organizing the Story By Elizabeth Pringle

This How-To covers the basics for creating a classroom film project.

Making Choices: Creating and Organizing the Story

This feature covers the basics for creating a classroom film project. Through the following suggestions, tips, and exercises you will get a better sense of the options available and the choices that might be made when making a film.

What a story needs:

•  A beginning, middle, and end. (The beginning introduces the who, what, when, where and why as well as the conflict; the middle demands that the characters deal with the conflict; and the end is the result of the choices made by the characters in dealing with the conflict.)
• Well-defined characters (age, gender, rhythm, etc…) who have a reason for being in the story.
• Conflict. We want to know what choices people make when confronted with an obstacle.
• How it all works out (or doesn’t) in the end. Try to sense what will keep the interest of the audience but not have them feel that the story is too long.

Thinking visually

A film is a visual story. The camera is the bridge to the audience. Beginning classroom filmmakers often look at the rehearsal of a story as though they were watching a play. A camera offers a view the action of the story from any side; up above or down below, far away or very close.

 

Exercise: Framing

Part one: Once the students have started to act out their stories, they create tableaus; freeze frames, important places in the scene where the students stop and take a picture. They create three tableaus: one from the beginning, one from the middle, and one from the end.

Part two: The students not in the scenes take a Styrofoam cup and remove the bottom. They will have a frame and a new way to view the story. Have these students walk around the frozen scene, and find the best places to look at the action; the most exciting or revealing angles. This is where they might consider placing the camera to shoot that scene. Go on to the next tableau. Then do the whole scene non-stop as the framing students take in the action through their cup lens.

 

Camera Shots

Next, consider some of the different kinds of shots a camera can take of a scene.

• Long shot – to establish where we are – what location and at what point in the action. 
  
• Medium shot – who is in the scene, we learn about character 
  
• Close up – what are emotions of the characters as revealed through the face

Long Shot

Medium Shot

Close-up

 

Exercise: Have students look through magazines and find pictures that demonstrate the different kinds of shots.

 

Take some time to shape the story into visual and verbal outlines.

Verbal outline:

Have the students create – individually or in groups – an outline of the story so far by writing down the main points of action, listing action as opposed to description or states of being. The verbs they use are very important. Action is what drives a story. Points should be brief and specific.

1. On a beautiful day Sally works in her garden.
2. Jonathan enters, looking sad. He tells Sally that they can no longer be friends.
3. Sally, now angry, stomps off.
4. Jonathan, looking cautiously around, plucks Sally’s most prized rose from the garden, hides it in his coat, and runs from the garden.
5. And so on.

Visual outline:

The Storyboard A storyboard is the visual outline of the story. It will look a little like a comic strip. It is used to tell the visual story and give an idea of how the film should look. Within each frame decide what shots to use, where the camera might be placed in relation to the action, and the action of the scene. It’s not necessary to be a visual artist to do a storyboard. It is fine to use stick figures.

Here is an example of a storyboard. Notice how camera shots have been suggested through placement of characters. You are ready to move into the production phase of filmmaking. In part 2 we take the story to the next level and share some of the basic elements of film production.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Pringle is an actress, playwright, director, and educator. She is the director of EAT (Education Arts Technology) and the creator of MHz Shortz Student Film Festival, both arts learning initiatives of MHz NETWORKS, a Washington, DC independent, intercultural, international public television broadcaster.