This afternoon I updated my shotlist for The Dark Side of the Earth to reflect the changes made to the script last month. The main purpose of this list, at present, is to arm me against the barrage of questions I will face from any serious financier or producing partner. Thanks to this comprehensive 54-page document, I will be able to explain exactly how every single shot in the film will be achieved, what will be miniature, what will be full-size, how many versions of the Fixer puppet will be required and what actions will be required of each one, how many days of motion control shooting will be needed, etc, etc.
This raises the issue of how prepared a director should be with their shots. Where do you draw the line between sensible preparation and stifling of creative spontaneity?
I’ve storyboarded many of my films in their entirety. Soul Searcher, The Beacon and even the original Dark Side had big folders of my dodgy storyboards generated for them, and I stuck to those boards very closely. Because I had to. On all of those films I was not just the director but the producer and DoP too. I didn’t have time on set to come up with shot ideas, so the storyboards were essential.
On Soul Searcher I also dabbled with previsualisation, creating a videomatic for the climactic Hades Express sequence using a Lego train. This proved most useful in post-production, when I could use the Lego shots as placeholders in the edit and show the clips to the model-makers.
As regular visitors to this website will know, a few years ago I created several Dark Side sequences in videomatic form (which can still be viewed on the video page), and I also had some scenes storyboarded, although the script has changed so much since then that much of this work is now sadly redundant. It was done as much to relieve the creative pressure on the inside of my skull as anything else.
If the film gets greenlit, my new shotlist will doubtless be translated into storyboards for most if not all of the movie, and many key sequences will probably be re-prevized (if such a term exists).
Because of the scale and expense of Dark Side, it would be foolish not to plan to the nth degree, but I’m very keen that the dialogue scenes remain loose enough that I can react to the performances on the set, adapting my shots and coming up with new ones to best compliment what the cast do.