Pre-production

Pre-production

With your story partially developed, now you need to start getting specific and detailed about how you’ll shift into the production process. The pre-production stage encompasses finalizing your script, drawing storyboards, wrangling actors, props, and locations, and generating the funding to make it all a reality…

Below are a few resources from our pre-production day to jumpstart your next creative project…

BUILDING BLOCKS OF FILMMAKING

Shots are the fundamental unit of film aesthetics. The characteristics of each shot, like their angle, degree of movement, or distance from their subject matter, have different effects on the viewer and serve varying storytelling purposes. As you plan your film, be as intentional as you can about the shot types you select because it will have a remarkable impact on your final product.

STORYBOARD TEMPLATE AND SHOT LIST

After your script is developed, plan out your production process with the aid of a storyboard and shot list. The storyboard will help you communicate the specific vision of your film to your collaborators and will give you an opportunity to edit your ideas on paper before you start the recording process. A shot list is beneficial to keeping you organized on your production days as you will likely be tackling your footage out of sequential order.

STORY SPINE

The “story spine” is an outlining tool designed by Pixar to quickly communicate the critical beats of your film to your collaborators. It’s a beautiful structure because it can be understood by any audience and mirrors the 3-Act Structure paradigm of most classic narrative films…

Once upon a time…
Whether you use these exact words or not, this opening reminds us that our first responsibility as storytellers is to introduce our characters and setting – i.e., to fix the story in time and space. Instinctively, your audience wants to know: Who is the story about? Where are they, and when is all this taking place? You don’t have to provide every detail, but you must supply enough information, says McDonald, “so the audience has everything it needs to know to understand the story that is to follow.”

And every day…
With characters and setting established, you can begin to tell the audience what life is like in this world every day. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, the opening scenes establish that Dorothy feels ignored, unloved, and dreams of a better place “over the rainbow.” This is Dorothy’s “world in balance,” and don’t be confused by the term “balance.” It does not imply that all is well – only that this is how things are.

Until one day…
Something happens that throws the main character’s world out of balance, forcing them to do something, change something, attain something that will either restore the old balance or establish a new equilibrium. In story structure, this moment is referred to as the inciting incident, and it’s the pivotal event that launches the story. In The Wizard of Oz, the tornado provides the inciting incident by apparently transporting Dorothy far, far away from home.

And because of this…
Your main character (or “protagonist”) begins the pursuit of his or her goal. In structural terms, this is the beginning of Act II, the main body of the story. After being literally dropped into the Land of Oz, Dorothy desperately wants to return home, but she is told that the only person who can help her lives far away. So she must journey by foot to the Emerald City to meet a mysterious wizard. Along the way she will encounter several obstacles (apple-throwing trees, flying monkeys, etc.) but these only make the narrative more interesting.

And because of this…
Dorothy achieves her first objective – meeting the Wizard of Oz – but this is not the end of her story. Because of this meeting, she now has another objective: kill the Wicked Witch of the West and deliver her broomstick to the Wizard. “In shorter stories,” says McDonald, “you may have only one ‘because of this,’ but you need at least one.”

Until finally…
We enter Act III and approach the story’s moment of truth. Dorothy succeeds in her task and presents the Wizard with the deceased witch’s broom, so now he must make good on his promise to help her return to Kansas. And this he does, but not quite in the way we initially expect.

And ever since that day…
Once we know what happened, the closing scenes tell us what the story means for the protagonist, for others in the narrative, and (not least of all) for those of us in the audience. When Dorothy awakens in her own bed and realizes she never actually left Kansas, she learns the lesson of the story: what we’re looking for is often inside us all along.

Text excerpted from “The Story Spine: Pixar’s 4th Rule of Storytelling” via Aerogramme Writer’s Studio

PITCH DECK EXAMPLES

After you finish your screenplay, you may need to pitch your project idea to producing partners to fund your vision. You want to be able to capture the vision for your project in an engaging and concise way. One way to do that is by building a pitch deck. Alessio co-designed these two pitch decks and “battle-tested” them in front of producers.