Condense Your Shotlist | Season 2: Episode 7

Here are the original storyboards for the gang scene in Corpse.

Poorly drawn and all over the place. We re-created the storyboards using photos taken in my living room.


By test shooting it allowed us to find common trends in the shots, which allowed us to combined them, and reduced it down to this. Reducing your shot list is actually a really helpful way to achieve the film look, and today we'll show you how.

Here is a prime example of too many shots in a storyboard. You have 3 close ups in a row here. Gino giving the knife. Tilly's face. Gino eating some pills.


But these shot types are to similar to each other and cutting them together would not look right. So we turned these 3 shots into 1 with movement by stitching them together and using a pan and tilt.

Here is another example. The scene in the tunnel:

Jason crouches. CU of pills. Jason picks them up. Jason's reaction.
Or: Jason crouches, and picks up the pills, then we see his reaction.

In a way, you can think of stitching shots together as adding commas to a sentence instead of using full stops. Commas create sentence flow, just like how pans and tilts make the movie flow.

Condensing your shot list will do 2 things:

It increases the efficiency of your shot list, which results in a quicker and more efficient turnaround on set.

And it makes you think about your shots as more than just a compilation of coverage.

As they say, limitation drives creativity.

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