[Mark Suszko] "some client guy looks at the rough cut and shoots it down because "it's not like I pictured it". Boards up front put everybody on the same page,"
Sometimes, but there are exceptions to every rule.
Last year we were doing a big (and pretty expensive) industrial, and the lady in charge of marketing at this very big company has absolutely
no ability to visualize things
whatsoever (how do these people get these kinds of jobs?).
She wasn't going to be able to join us for the shoot of the biggest and most complicated scene (a "motivational speaker" type scene doing employee training in a big theatre, audience extras, custom signage, lights and smoke effects, etc.)... so it was storyboarded within an inch of its life. After the scene was cut, she said "Oh. Ohhhh. I didn't know it was going to look like
that. That's not what I wanted at all. I thought we would just have this guy talking to a couple of people in a classroom."
Which of course is not what she had asked for, described, or signed off on.
I could have hit her with a shovel.
Instead of that though, I just smiled and said we would be happy to do her new idea, and that the good part is that it would cost only about a tenth of the unused scene that we would be billing her for anyway.
It just goes to show that even boards sometimes can't impart the vision.
Me personally, I usually operate opposite of Mark and Walter I guess... I
never make boards unless I absolutely
have to. To me the downside of them is that a client will see them and then be mentally "locked in" to that scene. And when a final product varys from the board (which it almost
always does at some point), it automatically provokes the "Oh, I thought you were going to do it such-and-such way" response, even when the new idea is much better than the one on the storyboard. While I will always sort of "pre-direct" a scene in my head, my vision invariably changes once I'm on location or on set and I don't like being locked into a preconceived notion, even if it is my own. We might do some pre-vis on something that has complex and precise blocking, but that is usually not the case.
When needed we do use a really good artist (he's basically a comic book, oops, er,
graphic novel illustrator) and he does really beautiful boards.... but I would much rather take the money that goes into producing the boards and put it on the screen whenever possible.
Unless we need them to
get the job. Then we will do boards all day.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
