Marcie Begleiter
In 1990 I was invited to teach a seminar at the American Film Institute on storyboarding. I created a weekend workshop based on my experiences of working with first-time directors. These men and women often came to directing through writing and were much less comfortable communicating about the visual aspects of the medium than they were about the narrative. I set out to make visual communication accessible to those filmmakers who felt they had no ‘talent’ for it.
From the beginning, the workshop achieved a popularity neither I nor AFI had anticipated. I added private workshops held each month at a local hotel and was eventually asked to join the film faculty at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. There I have been able to work with student filmmakers and develop a curriculum that encompasses many forms of pre-visualization for film including color theory, composition, storyboarding and narrative structure as it applies to constructing the frame.
