“Storyboarding occurs during pre-visualization (pre-vis), which is part of the pre-production stage. Filmmakers do pre-vis to see their movie, to plan it out. I do pre-vis because I want to lay out the movie as much as I can before I start production, so every day I’m shooting will be productive,” says David K. Irving.
“Storyboards are a terrific way for the director, the cinematographer, the art director, and any other key people in the crew to pre-visualize and see the movie ahead of time.”
“It’s like saying, ‘this is where we’re going to go for an extreme close-up, here’s the swish pan, this is the car chase. We need these 10 elements to have the car go around the corner. Maybe we need a shot here on two wheels with a little bit of dust kicking up.’ You pick and choose, then sketch out the shots and scenes you want. And when you put them together, that makes the film.”
What is pre-vis anyway
The storyboard is a key element, but there are many other elements found in pre-vis that can be helpful. Some are just basic, simple sketches of certain concepts for the film. “There’s also other drawings, that I like to use, they’re called floor plans,” Irving explains.
“The floor plans, these are bird’s eye views of your set or your location, with little V’s and circled letters indicating where the camera is going to be. I use them so I can see a bird’s eye view of what I’m shooting. ‘I’m going to move the camera here, here, and here.’ Because a lot of time, what we do in pre-production determines how the day will be, if it’s going to go well.”
Often, we have to switch the lights, so we want to make sure that the camera is pointing in one direction where we can use all the lights.
By doing a floor plan, we can pre-visualize what all those elements are.
“Pre-visualization techniques like storyboards, floor plans, these are all wonderful film industry tools to help us come up with our shot list. But I want you to keep in mind that once you get on set, you might end up throwing all of that away. You may decide you just want to film the shot currently in front of the camera. That’s what makes filmmaking so exciting,” ends Irving.
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When thinking about filmmaking, you can’t ever forget the importance of sound, Sam Pollard says. Dialogue, sound effects, and music all help enhance the storytelling. As a young editor working on Steinbeck’s, he would do all his sound editing himself because he didn’t have money to pay for a sound editor.
As Sam became more experienced, he worked on bigger films with bigger budgets. He was able to get sound editors and sound designers who could bring their professional style and technique to enhance the drama or the emotion of the film.
The sound design and sound arc of every film are different, in Sam’s view. Some films need lots of sound effects and sound design. Some films need less.
Caran Hartsfield agrees that sound design and sound effects add to the storytelling within the scenes. Ask yourself, what does it sound like in a scene where a boy meets a girl and it’s raining? She thinks it feels different than the sound design of firecrackers going off outside a room, right?
It completely changes the scene, Caran says. She thinks that sound design is a fun part of the filmmaking process because you can dramatically alter a scene with the sound effects that you choose.
She encourages any filmmaker to really play with sound because it’s so much fun. Just start pulling sounds that are interesting and have a good texture for you.
It could be the sound of a fan or the sound of a river going downstream. These sounds have very visceral effects and it’s subliminal. The audience isn’t thinking, “oh, that was a great river flowing down in that scene.” But Caran thinks that you’re ushering the audience in a particular direction in an undercover way.
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The score plays an integral role in the music in the movies we love. Let’s take a look at the importance the score plays in the film industry and TV industry.

“A movie score makes or breaks a movie. Let me start by saying that one of the great composers, Nino Rota, was an Italian composer who did a lot of Fellini films when Danny Elfman wrote the score for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” says David K. Irving. “It was Danny Elfman’s first score, but it was a full-blown Philharmonic. Nino wrote the score. I’ve always been amazed at the work that Danny Elfman did on that film”

Danny Elfman went on to do the Batman films. He’s an amazing composer. I think it’s worth your while to study composition, to study composers, to see what music can do on a film. Some films use a lot of music.

Star Wars is what we call wall-to-wall, where John Williams scored, basically, the whole movie. Other movies have fewer scores in them. It’s important to know how much score you might want to have in a movie, says David. At the end of a film, in the editing process, you do what’s called spot a film, where you sit with the composer and you say, in this scene, I want this kind of music, I want this kind of music.

It’s all done mathematically from this footage point to that footage point, fade out, fade in. It seems like a very natural transition.

Make sure you’re not having the music blare over somebody’s line. Make that underscore. All of that work that you do with the composer is done drastically in post-production. But the score is going to add a tremendous element to the film because, as I said, it bypasses the brain and goes right to the stomach, explains David.

There are a lot of terms that, even if you’re not musically inclined, you should know about: beats, how many bars, major keys, minor keys, crescendos-these are all languages you want to share with a composer.

Now, you do have the opportunity, as you would with a cinematographer, to show work that you think would be effective. So you can show your cinematographer photographs, other movies, say, “this is the kind of look that I want,” and it helps the cinematographer understand the look you’re going for.

The same is true for the composer. You can play different compositions, like, Philip Glass or Bernard Herrmann. This helps the composer understand what you want.

“Now, some composers will say, don’t play me any music. Just let me come up with the score because I want it to come full-blown from my head,” says David. “My favorite composer is Bernard Herrmann, who did most of Hitchcock’s movies.”

“Spielberg and George Lucas started to collaborate on movies together. They decided they were going to do Indiana Jones. But before they did that, George Lucas did the first Star Wars. And if you remember the first Star Wars, it was episode IV,” Thomas Mangan explains. “He had already conceived this as a series of nine movies.
In 1977 Lucas stated, “I’m going to make nine movies over two hours. I’m going to tell this story over 18 hours.” This led Spielberg and Lucas to collaborate on Indiana Jones, which was released two years later in ’79. Indiana Jones was also a trilogy. The idea of movie trilogies wasn’t perceived as sequels like they are now in today’s movies—it was considered a long-form from storytelling.
Lucas didn’t like the two-hour limit placed on films; therefore, he made a longer version of the movie by expanding them into a series of films. It changed the way the film industry made movies. However, many people interpreted it as “sequels work.”
Mangan states, “If you look at movies now, where even The Avengers still follow that model, they take the same characters and they put them in different movies. They interweave in between multiple stories, which is very akin to what Netflix has done with the binging of television shows.”

“They’ll make a show and then make it available so you can watch the whole show. But if you watch an episodic series of 10 shows or 8 TV shows—I just finished watching Killing Eve season 2 last night—it’s one long movie. Netflix copied George Lucas’s movie-making model to create this disruptive form of binge-watching TV.”

Color theory is one of the things that a film director would do when they’re about to tell a story, whether it’s a pilot or a film. It sounds pretentious, but then again, there’s no way to say this without sounding pretentious.
But basically, you get together with your partners on the film, such as your cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, and discuss color with them. Sometimes, with one department, it could go into textures of clothing, the sheen of wallpapers, and lens selection.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejob explains, “It’s always nice to assign colors. At least, I like to do that to certain characters. For instance, Rachel in Me and Earl was yellow. And there was always a little something of that around her space. And sometimes you see it, and sometimes you feel it. And by the end, when she passes away in the hospital, my idea was always to hold on to the color yellow on-screen for five, six, or seven seconds — I forget how much it was. Hopefully, by the time you got to that point in the story, you felt her presence because you associate it, maybe subconsciously, along the way. Maybe, maybe not. That’s just how I think.”
In Hunter, Gomez-Rejob assigned colors to every world. But the colors were not assigned to characters but to feelings or ideas, like revenge, or blood, the Fourth Reich, honesty, or militancy. And the film creators would then avoid specific colors in some scenes and really saturate them sometimes in others.
Gomez-Rejob further emphasizes, “I think it helps the overall design of a picture. But it also helps make decisions along the way. For instance, if you’re choosing the right tie for a character, you may be presented with five ties. Only one is right because this is who the character is. Or you find a certain wallpaper that has color in it that is just right for this scene or the color carpet.”
Color vocabulary helps in decision-making for every department. It tells them what to avoid and what not to avoid. It also explains how to be a little bit more nuanced if you’re trying to keep someone from knowing that a certain person is a Nazi, which was always assigned red. Maybe the actor’s pocket square would have purple in it.
And it’s just a little something that also helps actors, depending on who the actor is. But it is an actor’s secret sometimes that they have a lining that no one else will see. But it means something to them.
Gomez-Rejob feels joy in using color vocabulary. He says, “And it’s just something that I truly enjoy in a fine arts way. You are never alone to do something because some of the best ideas are going to come from somebody else. And then see everyone take ownership of those decisions along the way and have a feeling almost of an arts and crafts camp that you’re the leader of. I mean, I own my title, but I also love the collaborative nature of making the film.”
For people entering the film industry or TV industry, it’s important to know that directing starts with these decisions way before you ever get to set.

“How do you communicate to people? How do you put that in celluloid? How do you do it? It must have style, unity, just something about it. You’ve got to wave away what’s not useful to that theme you’re focused on,” says Ang Lee.
“People look at film not like real life, but an escape from life. They go to that abstract world, where you can have a heart-to-heart with each other.”
I think filmmaking without heartfelt style and language skills—that’s pretty vain to me. I think you should have something to say, because you feel you have a need to express something.
“You don’t know why. But that’s the most precious thing,” Lee continues.
“Without communication, I cannot explain to my crew or the investors, test screen audiences, even friends and family. People will say, ‘I don’t get this. I don’t get that.’ So, you have to talk. And while you’re talking, you lose that artificiality. You must.”
“And somehow it all becomes a common thing. You just secretly hope to keep as much as yourself in there as possible. That’s my experience,” says Lee.
How Lee’s shot choices convey mood
“Then you have the key shots. Sometimes I can visualize a shot or scene, very vividly in my dream, or in my daydream. Or when I see something, I must have that shot, no matter what. So, from there, you just fill in the gaps,” explains Lee.
“Most of the shots in the movie, there are actors talking. I just find the best way to portray them. If it’s emotional, if it’s warm, usually, I place the camera a little lower. If the camera’s high, it looks more like they’re thinking. Shot that’s more face on, that’s more direct. And of course, more sideways, it’s more objective.”
Many times, I would like to take the audience out of the movie, and have them just think about it, instead of just engage in the storytelling, the emotional ride. I want them to think about it. So, at these times I’ll do a high angle also.
“You mentioned big establishing shot. That’s when it’s not emotional. Then, I want to reset before I get engaged into the next paragraph or statement or what have you. But sometimes, I think it’s good to have an audience think about it objectively and engage subjectively, emotionally. I like to combine both,” Lee ends.
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”We use examples from classic and modern cinema to illustrate points for filmmakers about how things work,” Explains David K. Irving. “The best thing to do is find movies that themselves work. There are a bunch of classic films that we often refer to for filmmakers to study. Every great filmmaker constantly looks at films over and over again in order to see what got them excited about cinema and what works for them.”

One of the great films in cinema that Irving always encourage students to look at is Carol Rice’s film The Third Man. The Third Man is a fantastic film because the script is so tight. It’s a wonderful story that takes place in war-torn Vienna. The allies have divided the city into four distinct areas, so there’s a lot of illegal trade going on.

“What’s beautiful about the film is that Joseph Cotten comes to Vienna to find his friend Harry Lime, whom we talk about through the entire film. He’s talked about, talked about, talked about. He’s the third man, and we don’t reveal him until very, very late into the film. The arc of the story where we’re trying to find out who this third man is, who the third man finally gets revealed to be, and the twist on why the third man isn’t this wonderful character, which was cast as Orson Welles because he’s such a jolly fellow to play against type. It made for a wonderful arc in the film,” Irving says.

There are so many things about the film that are worth pointing out. One is that the final chase sequence takes place in a sewer. What better location to have a character who’s really displayed as a rat than in a sewer? The reason Irving likes to show this particular sequence is it’s a long chase sequence, but the director does such a wonderful job creating pace in this chase.

There are fast sequences, slow sequences, close-ups, long shots, breathing space, up, down. It has a rhythm that can’t be beat, and all of it takes place in the sewer. One of the other advantages of shooting in a sewer is that the camera gets this wonderful forced perspective down these long tunnels. At the end of the sequence, the character trying to escape the tunnel brings his finger up through a sewer grating, and the close-up of the hands trying to escape speaks volumes about the character.

Another scene Irving likes to show from the film when Harry Lime is revealed for the first time. Harry Lime is revealed through light. He’s hiding in a doorway. An inebriated Joseph Cotten is yelling at this character who he doesn’t know is in the doorway.

His yelling at night causes a woman on the second floor to turn her bedroom light on, which shines light down on Harry Lime. At that moment, Joseph Cotten knows that’s the main character. The use of cinematography and lighting to be able to illuminate character is very exciting for filmmakers to study, so you can apply these lessons that you learn from historical references in film, modern references in film, and what you’re going to do when you become a filmmaker.

There’s a movement right now in the world with streaming and online audiences, and filmmakers who self-distribute their films. These filmmakers figure out how to get their films booked and get them into theaters and do everything themselves. Taking the self-distribution route is completely possible for you, too. It takes a lot of work, but it’s definitely possible.

According to film industry expert David Ninh, “When I think about the role of distributors that we work for, and specifically our distributor and my role, it’s very curatorial.” Distributors look for unique storytelling. They look for whether or not the filmmaker has an interesting voice or an interesting story that they want to tell the world. They look at the film and if it’s going to be relevant and special down the road in their library. Or if it’s going to become a classic, because distributors sometimes compete for films. David adds, “I think that when there is a good film, there’s a lot of interest. A lot of distributors want it for themselves so that they can put their stamp on it and put it out to the world with the filmmaker.”

Those are very striking instances for the filmmaker to figure out the right home for their film, to get the film out to the world, and to figure out who can be the best partner for them to get it out in the widest way possible. Filmmakers need to outline the goals for their films. Some filmmakers just want a lot of money and to sell the film. Some filmmakers are more concerned with getting it out organically and having the theatrical experience by getting it rolled out in as many theaters as possible. The money is secondary to them because it’s more important to build the profile of their film in their career.

 “Being an editor gets you to understand the whole process of what a script needs, what production needs, and then, ultimately, what you need in the editing room in order to make your film effective,” David K. Irving explains. “The editor will want to spend a lot of time with the director thinking through how they want to do the story. They usually do their first cut, which is called an assembly, based on the script, and then they’ll eventually cut it down. Their most important job is creating a rhythm or a sense of pace in the film, so the film moves along.”

“I know when Shakespeare would write his tragedies, his first act always ended on a very tragic note, but he would always start the second act with a little comic scene for relief, so the audience could relax and then build up their tension for the tragedy that would happen at the second act.”

An editor, too, is looking for all those rhythms. They’re built into the script. Ideally, the director has given the editor everything he or she needs to put it together, but the editor is not on set. The editor is only making a movie out of the material they have in front of them.

“For example, many times, with an editor, I’ve seen them take a shot from an early scene and put it in a later scene as long as the wardrobe matched because it’s what they wanted in terms of their eyeballs going left to right. There’s a lot of freedom in the editing room. You have to let an editor be freeform in order to make sure they make the best movie possible,” Says Irving.

“As directors, we often get very stuck on the material we shoot. I shot a single take scene where at the end of the scene, one of the actor’s wardrobe got connected to another actor’s wardrobe and got dragged off the set. The actor was smart enough to come back on the set, but I didn’t print that take because I said I can’t use the shot if the continuity doesn’t work.”

“My editor said ‘the audience will never see the continuity problem’. That’s the take with the most energy, and that’s what’s in the film now. I, as the director, cringe every time I see it, but the editor made the right decision.”

In Midnight Cowboy ,the very famous movie with Dustin Hoffman and John Boyd, they almost get hit by a taxicab in the middle of the street in the middle of a scene, and Dustin Hoffman stayed in character as “Ratso” Rizzo, banged on the front of the taxi, and said, ‘I’m walking here! I’m walking here!’ That was never planned in the script, but in the editing room, we’re able to put it together and get this great moment that wasn’t planned, but the editor was able to use it to great effect.

An international film festival: early beginnings
“I was living in New York in the 1950s where there was this guy named Amos Vogel. He showed independent films in downtown New York in alternative spaces to various audiences,” Eugene Hernandez recounts. “Later Richard Roud, a Londoner, came to New York and to the Lincoln Center, where the New York Film Festival (NYFF) is now held.
The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts was founded in the late ’50s, early ’60s as this kind of arts campus for different art forms: ballet, opera, the philharmonic, and various other art forms.
“This is what started the connection between Amos Vogel, a guy presenting films in downtown New York, and Richard Roud, who showed films at London film festivals before moving to New York,” explains Hernandez. (Vogel and Roud co-founded the New York Film Festival.)
The NY film fest-where being different is the norm
The New York Film Festival has shown diverse cinema styles over the years. And it continues its tradition toward distinct filmmaking—high-profile films with well-known actors and directors.
Celebrated films from all parts of the world. Films that haven’t yet played to an audience in New York.
“This is the big thing about the New York Film Festival—each fall it introduces new films to new audiences, particularly to New York audiences,” Hernandez continues.
“Hundreds and hundreds of films are submitted for consideration each year, but few are selected,” Hernandez points out. “It takes place over a few weeks at Lincoln Center, at other parts of the city, and online.”
Short films, experimental films, movies from all over the world come here to New York to be discovered by audiences.
New York Film Festival is for film lovers
There’s a lot more festivals now, but NYFF has become an annual fall gathering place. Audiences get an overview, a cross-section of which films and filmmakers stand out for the fall season.
NYFF is highly regarded because it has a relatively small program, with only 25 to 30 films.
“It’s a place where we get a measure of what’s new, what’s celebrated, and what’s so special about the art form of filmmaking,” ends Hernadez.

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