Screenplays and Storyboards http://artswork.asu.edu/arts/students/tb/03_06_screenplay.htm

This is a visualization activity, requiring that students learn how setting, props, and character-action communicate information about the characters and the story. Access to videos and a video camera are important.

The students should understand the elements of a play and the process of writing a scenario.

Vocabulary: screenplay, storyboard, cameraman, close up

Use:

To teach students to visualize and then write a screenplay or a storyboard

Standards

1. Theatre:
   • Visualize a scene that will tell the story

   • Communicate that visualization through a written screenplay and/or draw it through a storyboard
   • Critique the visual aspects of a video or film

2. Language Arts:
   • Create visual representations

   • Interpret visual cues

Materials:

Screenplay or Storyboard form for each student.
Find at the web site.

Your Role:

1. Explore with the students, using scenes from a good movie, how it is possible for the camera to share information with the audience. Still photos from their own work can also be used. Or have them create tableaux to illustrate character relationships or actions.

2. Discuss a scene that can share information without language, in pantomime. Set up the scene and let the students view it through the lens of a video camera. For example, one of our Chinese students wrote about a family in China that had to put one of their twins up for adoption because of the one child law. To make the scene poignant, we videotaped, from the back, the figure of the inspector holding the child's small suitcase in one hand and the child's hand in his other hand from as they walked away from the camera. We then cut to the figure of the boy twin looking at his mother asking where the man was taking his sister and when was she coming back.

3. Read the Screenplay Example (at the above address) with the students.
4. Have them write a short screenplay for a scene they are working on. Perhaps you can act as scribe as the whole class contributes to the story.

5. Using the screenplay to record the scene with the camera, preferably with students running the camera.

6. View the scene, discussing what images told the story.
   Use the same process, but using a storyboard. Read a Storyboard and give them a copy of the Storyboard Form http://artswork.asu.edu/arts/students/tb/03_06_screenplay.htm#storyboard

Time:

• Introduction, 30 minutes

• Writing, 15-30 minutes

• Taping, 20-30 minutes

• Viewing and critiquing tape, 20 minutes

Assessment:

1. Could the students explain what the images in the movie or video communicated?
2. Did they imagine scenes that would communicate the story?
3. Did they write or create simple drawings that communicated their visual ideas to you as director and to the student cameraman?
4. Did they critique their work in a positive, helpful manner?

Now the students should be ready to work in small groups, creating their own screenplays.