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Working with Concept Drawings


As a filmmaker I have countless times relied on story boards, visual shot lists and concept drawings to help me shoot my films.


With my background in graphic design, I was used to the concept of story boarding since back in those days I love drawing comics. It's the most underrated process in our local film industry, most of the time due to the budget factor, the boarding and sometimes even concept visuals are skipped completely.


I do most of the visuals on my own, for shot list, they could be very rough thumbnails, and as for All for Love I drew a couple of sketches of how the film will look. I began the drawings only after I have lock down the locations. It helps also to set the props in a scene and the mood.


Sometimes you may not get the shot exactly how you've envision even with a storyboard because of a lot of reasons, for instance the shot of the school girl walking along the flats are quite different than the one I have drawn. We did filmed a shot similar to the sketch but it didn't work during edit and was left out.


As for the second shot of the camera repair man, it's quite similar because of the layout of the flat and I could already imagine how the shot would look and how I can block the actors. And the flat was empty, the drawings gave me a guide to how to dress up the set with minimal effort.


For shooting boards or shot lists I usually work with pen, pencils on sketch books. But for single concept drawings I usually work on the iPad with Paper 53.

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