When dealing with first time filmmakers, it can be difficult to teach them the importance of telling their story visually. Students don’t initially see the importance of breaking their movie up into separate shots. Breaking a movie into shots can help the audience understand what’s happening better, make the movie more interesting, and make the filmmaking process easier for students.

First time filmmakers will naturally shoot a movie like a stage play; set the camera up in the corner of the room 20 feet from the action and run through the entire movie at once. Having students write a synopsis can help them better organize their project and break their film up into different shots. Have students write down, part by part, what happens in their film. Students should only write what the audience will be seeing on screen, make sure they leave out any explanations of how a character feels or why they’re doing something.

For instance, the following could be a synopsis for a brief sequence:

A student is sitting at his desk, writing. Suddenly his pencil breaks. He gets looks at the broken pencil and frowns. He sees a pencil sitting on another student’s desk. He stands up and walks over to the desk and takes the pencil. He sits down back at his own desk and continues writing.

This synopsis is simple, it explains what happens part by part, and only explains what the audience sees. If it had said, “the student’s pencil breaks so he can’t finish his test and gets sad” there would be no clear way to get this across visually. Make sure students only write what we can see. If a character needs to feel sad, ask the students how they can get that across visually.

Once students have finished their synopses they are ready to storyboard or start filming. Each sentence in the synopsis is a new shot in their movie. Students only need to worry about one piece of action at a time, rather that filming everything at once. Again, we’re not filming a stage play. When students come across the sentence, “Suddenly his pencil breaks.” They’re only goal is to get a shot of a pencil breaking, nothing else matters at the moment. This means they can get a close up or extreme close up of only a pencil breaking.