Possibly?

In a few weeks its finals again. Yay! Okay, that's a lie, no yay. I have never understood the necessity of a final test, final project, or any other final anything. I think my work throughout ten weeks shows my understanding of different mediums or subject matter much better than one single ending thing. But hey, its life.

So, I think for my final, my first idea would be to create a video about the smell in Marysville or surrounding area I suppose. More specifically how the god awful smell is affecting the citizens of the town. I know their is quite a bit of technical information and people have a number they can call every time they smell it, but I want to see a ground view video of actual citizens dealing with a noxious odor in their daily lives.  Can they function normally, can they picnic or BBQ, do they wear bio-chemical filtering gas masks when they leave the sanctity of their homes? A real person to person video would, I feel, bring the issue in tighter to the community and people would be heard better.

Another idea I had would be to interview some people who are transplants to Marysville. I mean in the sense of actually moving to the city or having grown up with family that moved to the city. I want to know what they feel are pros, cons, and any feeling towards living here. I know for myself personally it was a big change and I want to find out if others share a view point with me, or another transplant. Who knows we could start a club.

Storyboarding. What, When, Why?

To storyboard you need to things: a story, and a board. Pretty self explanatory isn't it? Okay, maybe you can get away without the board, but its still a basic concept. You have a story and you take pictures, videos, words, anything really, and you line them up in a way to tell the story. Ultimately story-boarding is an organization tool. A sort of pre-edit if you will.

Now when I think of story-boarding I think of movies where directors and such take drawings of scenes and ideas and then put them up on a real board. They can organize everything they want to shoot and pre-plan the sequential order of the scenes. But the greatest advantage to this pre-plan is how liquid story-boarding is. Say they start shooting but something just doesn't fit, or when the final edits are going through the story could be better arranged. Using that previous storyboard they can move ideas around so that the story is better told.

But what does a storyboard look like? When I see a storyboard in my mind its a blown up comic strip; all Kabooms and Kapows! A nice example of this is on a page I found on the omnipotent Google. This page shows a basic storyboard the graphics, the cut lines about what the story is telling, and the order the scenes should be shot.

Save yourself some time, energy, and MONEY. Use a storyboard.