TREATMENT, LYRICS AND STORYBOARD

ORDER OF ACTION:

• The lyrics. Post them on your blog straight away as a basis for your ideas about your treatment: will you illustrate, amplify or use disjuncture? How will you use the chorus / refrain? How will you showcase the performers and how will we see them perform?
• Cutting to the beat. Think about this from the start. You'll have to edit for the music as much as for the lyrics.
• Lip synching. Which words are we going to see the performers singing in close-up? They'll probably be significant ones. 
• Your treatment. Get it right early on. Be sure to have the right balance of genuine 'music video' approach to narrative.Ensure that the focus is on performance. Write a treatment and bring it to the table for discussion.  Get the green light before going ahead.
• Your storyboard. In Post-It notes first which allow you to have an overview of the whole and move it around easily. Then drop photos of the Post-Its into iMovie or Premiere to create an animatic.
• Storyboard as much of it as possible. It might be tempting not to bother with storyboards but it is a mistake if you do so. You need a visual plan for your work as it won't just happen when you have a camera in your hand! I would recommend using post-its for constructing a storyboard, as you can move the frames around and change the order easily. 
• Animatic Once you have done the storyboard, the next step is to turn it into an animatic, which quite literally involves taking a photo of each frame (on your phones or a webcam, nothing fancy) and then dropping the frames onto the timeline of your digital editing program. You can then cut them to length, in time with your music on the audio line and then export the whole thing as an animatic- a moving storyboard. Here's one of the first thirty seconds of a video...
  
   
• Wicked Little Girls animatic