Short Narrative Movie Project
The Art & Craft of Video Production
Teacher: Ken Kimura
email: ken_kimura at lsrhs dot net
OBJECTIVE
Using what you learned about continuity and incorporating what we will cover about the elements and structure of stories, you will produce a movie that tells a clear and concise story. Consider that even many television commercials tell a complete story in thirty seconds. Your movie should be no longer than 5 or 6 minutes. Anything longer would require committing to a significant amount of time outside of class.
PROJECT & STORY ORGANIZATION
I require that you break your story and production into sections. This will help you be clear about your intentions as well as help you keep organized during production. Your story development should eventually result in a structure that is organized into acts, scenes, and shots.
Within a scene, continuity between shots and continuity of time is generally very important. It is between scenes that you have the best opportunities to compress time. For this reason it's important that you define your scenes so that you know how to handle shots within scenes as well as how scenes begin, end, and how they tranistion into each other.
MAIN IDEA - THEME
At some point during story development, it should be clear to you what the theme or main idea of your story is. Like writing a paper, your thesis statement should be presented very early. Also like a paper, all of the elements and ideas you incorporate into your story should help support the main idea or theme. It should dictate all the decisions that need to be made.
Your preproduction will require creating many “drafts” of your story. You will begin by building an outline of your story. Over a number of class session you will be adding to and revising this outline. As we discuss elements of a story, you will incorporate these ideas into your outline. As we discuss story structure, you will revise your outline to reflect the story structure.
Once your outline is completed, this will be translated into a visual storyboard. Depending on the number of scenes in your movie, you may want to divide your group into sub teams to storyboard different scenes.
GRADING
You will need to turn in storyboards as well as notes regarding props, costumes and locations.
Your grade will be based on the effective use of your time, and how well your movie has been constructed both creatively and technically. You will also be evaluating the participation of your group members.
OTHER REQUIREMENTS
- Movie is edited so that it starts and ends on black
- Music credits include both composer credit and performer credit
- Credits include full names of group members
- Music ends appropriately or fades out
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