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I recently wanted to try out a few iPhone apps from the filmmakers point of view, the biggest one being “Hitchchock”.
Hitchcock, or Cinemek Storyboard Composer (are they being sued for using the word Hitchcock?) is a simple storyboarding software that allows something unprecedented; storyboarding right on your iPhone!
I started by writing a quick 3 page script that used locations all in our office, 3 simple locations, an elevator, an office and a storage room. Then, it was off to snap the photos of the locations with my iPhone. Rather then having a storyboard artist sit and draw out each and every frame (and then wait for him to go and do it) I was doing it myself. The beauty is that you can take actual shots of the locations you are really going to shot in. The shots can be taken with the on-board iPhone camera or can be shot with a traditional camera and loaded onto the phone. You can take photos directly within the app or import photos from your photo library.
Once all of my photos are in, comes the fun part. You simple begin arranging the storyboards in shooting order.
Hitchcock is laid out into basically two sections, the storyboard section, where you arrange storyboards and the panel section, where you actually work on that individual panel. That’s where you get all the work done.
Once my storyboard panels are in the right order (which is my only complaint of the whole app, it can be a little tricky sliding those panels around and sometimes they do weird things), now it is time to go and interact with each individual panel. I shot some of my panels with actors standing in, but others I left clean and added “outline” characters after the fact.
Unfortunately, there aren’t too many choices with the “characters” so I try not to use them more them necessary. They just stand there, they can be male or female and you can turn them into profile and that’s it.
You also have total control over adding screen actions such as dolly shots, push-ins, pans, etc.. You can also control actors movement with the arrows that show them moving within the frame, turning around or going off-screen, etc. (notice the arrow buttons on the right)
Here is another example of how you can add a pan into your story board, notice the bottom options that show where you can adjust the begining nad end of the pan.
Along with adding movement to your frames you can also adjust the duration of each frame to show how long each one will appear in the final film. You can record audio onto that final shot, except that you are just recording the audio over the iphone mic so it is strictly temp audio. Also, keep in mind that if the duration of your frame is 3 seconds, but your dialoge is 10 seconds, it will cut off recording at 3 seconds.
Once you are done with your storyboard you have a few options. One is that you can simply watch it back on your iPhone. It plays it back, much like a Quicktime, complete with audio and zoom into pictures and all the moves you’ve designed in, this is the coolest way to watch. The unfortunately thing is that there is no way to EXPORT OUT that video at this time. I’m
hoping this is something they will fix in a future release. But, being able to show that to your DP as your quick “vision” of the film could be pretty cool.
The next option is wh at you’ll really be doing to give to others and work with on set.. Under menu you can “export” the finished storyboad. What this actually does is renders the storyboard to a PDF.
And finally taking you to your e-mail where you can e-mail out a link to the PDF to as many people as you’d like.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I see this as Hitchcock’s only realy drawback. I wish I could export that Quicktime. I mean, the PDF storyboards are great, but having an actualy moving storyboard would be awesome and having everyone on set huddle around my iPhone just doesn’t cut it. Otherwise, the app is easy to us and well designed and I plann on using it a lot more.
Included here is the final movie from our little experiment:
Download the PDF storyboards created by the software.
As a side not, we shot the film on a Canon 7D, but to solve our audio woes, we recorded audio seperately and used the iSlate application on the iPhone to act as our slate. Ironically, we shot video on a $2000 Canon camera and recored audio on a $9000 Sony camera…hey, that’s what we had access to!!!!
Tucker Dansie
