Storyboard Pro

Once again I am amazed and impressed by the FREE software available on the net. I just used Storyboard Pro to storyboard my first summer video, a 12 minute comedy about two seniors who meet via a dating service for seniors. My working title is SUNSET HEARTS. At any rate, the software is intuitive, versatile and practical -- and in the end you print out what amounts to a shooting outline for your film. So you can do a lot of the grunt work before you even pick up the camera. This is going to be a hoot. Now I need the right two actors ... a woman with class and a blue collar kind of guy. No difficult locations, or at least it seems not. The 26 scenes I storyboarded clock in at about 12 minutes, just right.

What I can do over the summer is this:

• storyboard and write several scripts
• shoot them all while I have a free schedule
• do editing and post-production later
• in other words, get the raw footage during the summer and worry about the finished product later

It would be great if I could do more than one over the summer. I'm not sure how long it would take to shoot these. Even if it took a month to shoot, which I doubt, I should be able to do three. I think around ten minutes is the right length for a project like this.