Storyboarding and Directing

I'm pretty deeply involved with making the film now, and the pressure is certainly on. We've been having some really great casting sessions with both child and adult actors, and it's been quite promising. I'm excited and anxious at the same time about the prospects! In terms of the directing, for some time, I 've been a bit nervous about preparing for directing the film. For me, this movie is all about emotion and subtext, so the performances really do have to pop. I've always been unsure of how much storyboards help with directing, but my husband has been storyboarding the key scenes out for me, and I have to say, it's been so, so helpful in terms of seeing the movie. Not only that, but it also forces me to think about actors' actions, motivation and overall story flow. The thing with storyboarding is that it would be immensely difficult to draw out all of the coverage for each scene, but what we're doing is laying out a general look/feel of the scene, then from THAT, I'll actually figure out the coverage. My method is to use storyboards and photos of the locations to then come up with a floor plan and a coverage list. I used to feel a bit ambiguous about this process before, but now I get it. Basically, the boards and locations photos help me think about defining space, defining space then helps me think about motivation and action, which then in turn creates story flow. This process helps me basically conceptualize the general ideas, then I can get more specific from there. A lot of the specifics will change as we get to the set, at least I have some rough idea of what I want. The boards are also super helpful in terms of communicating with the DP, Production Designer, gaffer and other key crew folks.