Good point, I guess most filmmakers basically turn their script into a graphic novel of sorts before they shoot anyway.
….not entirely. I know three storyboardists quite well; I could elucidate if need be. Sin City was done shot-for-frame with Frank Miller as co-director. 300; not so much. The interesting case study is 30 days of Night which was written as a screenplay, didn't sell, then converted to a graphic novel which was made into a movie.
What's the alternative to storyboarding? Or is it just not necessary? My outsider's impression was basically that you write a script and then turn it into something that resembles a rough graphic novel so it's easier to plan out your shooting schedule etc.
Storyboarding isn't "turning it into a graphic novel." It's turning each camera shot into a shot of movie. The script runs underneath it. In a comic or graphic novel, what matters is what fits on the page, how it flows, and the layout. In a storyboard, what matters is whether or not the visual composition tells the story of the screenplay. One of my buddies is on this page. You'll note that storyboards are pretty much about "where are we going to put the camera" and "what is it going to do." A lot of storyboardists come from comics, or started in comics, or bounce in and out of comics (another storyboardist friend has his own label) but the intentions are actually quite different. The alternative to storyboards, which is eating up the livelihood of lots of storyboardists, is previz. Generally done in Maya at Hollywood scales, you can do it in simple shit like Sketchup. The indie piker's previz of choice is FrameForge, which also provides (at a premium) a number of 3D tools. I own FrameForge and am pretty good in it. For a while I was doing graphic novel layouts in it, but it's too much work and the results are uncanny valley in the extreme. That's the thing about storyboards - they're decidedly more human.
So to continue my flawed analogy, a storyboard is going to have way more "pages" than a graphic novel of the same material would? But, if you feel like answering another question, how do you decide which shot gets a storyboard frame? Surely you can't account for every single different frame of a movie, too labor intensive.
Way more. Every time you see a cut in a movie, there's a frame of storyboard. Simple. Every single goddamn one. No, but you get every single shot. As in, every single time we put the camera somewhere else, every single time we roll and then cut. I don't think the White People Edition has it, but the Chinese and Japanese DVDs for Spirited Away include an alternate video track - the animatics of the film. That's the storyboards, timed out and presented as video. It was kinda trippy when I saw it, because my Chinese DVD defaulted to video track 2 for some reason. I thought it was a decidedly low-fi Miyazaki, but still pretty cool. I had to watch the first 20 minutes over again when I figured it out.So to continue my flawed analogy, a storyboard is going to have way more "pages" than a graphic novel of the same material would?
But, if you feel like answering another question, how do you decide which shot gets a storyboard frame?
Surely you can't account for every single different frame of a movie, too labor intensive.
No idea. You can extrapolate, though - here's a nice representative clip from Jurassic Park. I count 8 shots in the first minute. It's 127 minutes long, of which probably 8 minutes or so are credits'n'shit. Spitballing, we're talking around a thousand shots. Compare and contrast, though - here's Tony Scott's *Domino.* there's a dozen shots in 30 seconds. If you had to storyboard that shit (all 127 minutes - what a coinkidink!) you'd be looking at around three thousand shots. Fortunately, Tony Scott didn't storyboard shit. He brought three or four cameras, pointed them all over the place, shot the fuck out of everything and then gave it in a bucket to his editors and said "turn this into a movie." Crimson Tide was shot with four cameras simultaneously and the editor had to turn over 240 hours of footage into a 2-hour movie. Michael Mann did nine cameras on some shots of Miami Vice. So you don't exactly get a one-to-one.
Hitchcock made a movie, Rope, with exactly 9 cuts, each one only because the film he was using came in 10 minute reels. If you watch it, you will count 4 cuts, the other 5 are disguised with close ups on dark objects such as a man's suit. Edit: I guess technically it's 10 cuts, since the end of the movie is a cut. But maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
Funny that you mention that movie, because I just recently heard of it the other day. They are screening it soon at the Detroit Film Theater, which is the theater associated with the Detroit Institute of Art. I read about it in their flyer, and I plan to see it. Funny the way you avoid something in your consciousness for years then come across it multiple times in a short span. That seems to happen a lot. Maybe it's a matter of just paying attention.