Visual Storytelling

What kills pretty much any short film?

I recently created a commentary on my old short film “Sacramentum”. Back when I made that film, I learned a lot about organization, perseverance, and more.

In particular, my friend Christian kept me from calling it quits when it looked like rain would ‘ruin’ our shoot (hint: it rained on and off but didn’t ruin the shoot – where there’s a will there’s a way, more often than not).

But most of all, I learned how important it is to do visual planning as a director, and told myself I’d never again not know what my film would look like–more or less–before the camera starts rolling.

Why? Because not planning out the visuals (and therefore a large chunk of what makes a film work) killed my short film “Sacramentum” and kept it from being better.

Here’s my case study on what did/didn’t work about my film “Sacramentum”, and what you can learn from my mistakes.



Why, exactly, is it so vital that you go through visual planning?

The main reason is that it forces you to think through each of the elements present in your film (yes, even sound), consider what your film might end up looking like, and then justifying each element by actively thinking of how it’ll affect your audience.

Visual planning also allows you to make many of your difficult creative choices before ever stepping foot on set. You can then use all available brain-power to solve the problems that will inevitably come up on set instead of trying to puzzle through a tough creative decision on set and figure out how it will affect your audience.

I go over the visual planning process for directors much more thoroughly in this article. I also explore one aspect of visual planning – the director’s visual reference (lookbook), which is something I do for every film, no matter how small, because it makes for that much better of a film in the end.

As always, I’m glad you took the time to check out this article, and I hope you find it useful. Now get out there and make another film!