Task Five – ideas
You are going to write and storyboard an advert which is about a minute long for the charity you have created.Someone once said that: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!” Basically this means that we can all have really good ideas, but they won’t just fall in our laps if we stare at the wall (or the telly, or FaceBook) hard enough and long enough. The best ideas come after hard work – therefore you will need to give yourself every chance to come up with a good idea for a TV advert and 3 print based adverts that link together.
Remind yourself of the charity’s aims, and what it does
Think about what your slogan says about the charity, what the focus is
Think about your target audience
Think about your research of existing campaigns
Then: Mind-map possible narratives, characters, settings, props, visual images, lines of dialogue, statistics etc
Basically – write anything down that comes into your head, a scene, a shot, a person! Anything can spark bigger ideas; The Usual Suspects has possibly one of the most complex narratives of any American film of the past twenty years and yet the entire film came from an idea the writer had for what he thought would be a ‘cool looking’ movie poster and a single line of dialogue that had been going round his head!
Look for inspiring statistics or shocking facts – these will be your most likely source when it comes to charities – but write it all down and put it somewhere with all the other ideas. You are going to have to work through that 99% of blood, sweat and tears before you find that 1% of inspiration!
Task Six – scene outlines & step treatment
So you’ve got a good idea for a 60 second TV advert and you want to make it look as dynamic and visually interesting as possible?
Good! But before you turn into Steven Spielberg and start the storyboarding process you need to get organised.
Visualise the advert in your head and write down step by step everything that happens in the advert.
Use the template provided to write down what happens in your advert on a shot by shot basis.
Your advert should be about twenty shots long. Here's an example...
This advert is about half the length of the adverts that you will be creating. However it is still twelve shots long.
Look at the amount of detailed mentioned in each section - you should replicate this when thinking of your own ideas.
If a step treatment is done correctly then Storyboarding becomes a relatively straight forward task.
Look at the amount of detailed mentioned in each section - you should replicate this when thinking of your own ideas.
If a step treatment is done correctly then Storyboarding becomes a relatively straight forward task.
Do all this and you are now ready to begin Storyboarding...
Click here to return to the list of pre-production tasks.
