The Storyboard Artist
Giuseppe Christiano
Michael Wiese Productions (2011), 210 pages, profusely illustrated.
$24.95, Available in January 2012
www.mwp.com
The author of this book is a craftsman who’s sketched everybody from Paul Newman to Madonna, who’s been yanked around the world (over the phone and internet and sometimes physically), who commutes from Italy to California and most of Europe, plunged into every kind of moviemaking situation, from music videos to major features. He’s a freelancer who’s mastered juggling of demanding directors and producers who hunger for previz, who manages his time so adroitly he can work one project while waiting for comments on the second. My kind of guy.
Giuseppe Christiano is an artist and filmmaker who, by his own description always wanted to draw comics and be creative. He sidestepped college, and today he’s living the dream. Now he shares it with us in a new Michael Wiese book all about storyboarding technique. He shares meeting his mentor Moebius, who introduced him to storyboarding on a visit to the master’s studio. He guides us through exercises in anatomy, perspective, composition, lighting, how to show movement of subject and camera.
Storyboards are everywhere in modern media. We learn storyboards aren’t just for storytelling from a script, they are also budgeting tools for costly effects. They are client boards to sell a product campaign, and production boards to guide a shoot, and animatics, which require further sophistication, such as eyes drawn on a separate layer so they can be moved during animation. Boards are even employed in website design.
Giuseppe covers all these examples and more in a lavishly illustrated book Of course my favorite chapter is Storyboard Movies, where he describes the storyboarder as the one of the first people to swing a script into pictorial visualization, usually in session with the director.
His advice on career building is impressive and shows care. If I’d had him as a guide when I was younger, I would have missed out on the editing craft, I would have told him about getting a ream of typing paper with one side mis-mimeoed from my mom’s office work, which I went through on the floor of our living room, storyboarding the complete Disney movie THE SHAGGY DOG—the original, with Fred MacMurray, Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello– from memory, having just seen it. I did so love it. It’s amazing how effectively this teaches basic editing. I was nine years old.
Many artists like Giuseppe started very young. He expands on his and the reader’s development by suggesting ways into the drawing craft—ad agencies are a good entry, the pace is fact, the work can be steady. Build up a portfolio. Learn new techniques in filmmaking, and how zooms, dollies and story flow is indicated—all the nuts and bolts I needed as a nine year old are finally here, collected in one genuinely instructive and revealing volume. Which belongs on any artist’s shelf
CLIPWRAP 2.4.1
$49.00, for PowerPC and Intel Macintosh
Divergent Media, Inc.
www.divergentmedia.com
ClipWrap is one of those amazing utilities you don’t know you need until you come across HDV m2t, m2ts (MPEG-2) files or AVCHD’s MTS (H.264 MPEG Transport Stream) files. These are highly compressed formats in which popular consumer cameras like Canon Vixias and others store their high definition video files, on inexpensive flash cards or discs.
Mac’s QuickTime Player can’t handle raw MTS. It’s basically a file wrapper issue. The data inside the file is perfectly usable, although once rewrapped, you shouldn’t try editing in any of these compressed formats, because they present frame data on the fly rather than give you full-data frames you need for editing. Sometimes MTS is readable and exportable using the VLC Player (an open source media player) but when they’re not, you have a serious bottleneck.
ClipWrap to the rescue. Throw a bunch of MTS files into its clean and simple work window, set a destination, choose whether or not to simply rewrap the files, or also to transcode them, recommended for editing, into any installed QuickTime formats like the Final Cut Pro’s ProRes flavors, Avid’s three major DNxHD flavors, Panasonic’s DVCPro, Apple Intermediate Codec or even classic DV, for editing, and click Convert. Take a coffee break.
ClipWrap offers a checkbox to convert the compressed AC3 audio accompanying most MTS files into edit-friendly linear PCM format.
ClipWrap automatically handles most spanned clips from these sources, especially when you drag over the entire media folder from the card. ClipWrap knows the structure within each folder and reads spanned clip info therein. In rare cases where a span is missed, you can join them manually for reprocessing.
A free trial download is available which processes only the first minute of each clip.
Some installable codecs such as the Perian.component troubles ClipWrap as it does other applications. The short ClipWrap manual lists some of these; they can be disabled easily.
There are more expensive and fancier utilities out there for this workflow but this is the first one I’ve encountered that zeroes in on exactly what I needed– a one-way trip to QuickTime– with a carefully selected range of popular workflow choices- to copy unreadable MTS files into a Mac editing format. Divergent seems to know its usership pretty well.
I used ClipWrap to re-wrap and simultaneously transcode 20 hours of ACVHD 1080 23.98 fps footage into ProRes422 1080 footage, and although it takes five times the storage space of MTS, it looks and plays great (except for that occasional blown out 109 IRE luminance common to these cameras). I’m happy as a clam who escaped the bake.
Loren Miller writes Tech Edge for IMAGINE, and is
a freelance film editor and producer working coast to coast.
Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com