Establishing Shots

For me, I always find establishing shots to be one of the most difficult shots to do in storyboarding, because you have to generate viewer interest immediately and tell the story and space, without relying on your characters to do so.

The establishing shot should foreshadow what's going to happen, it should set the mood of the scene. An establishing shot is more like architecture or marketing than character acting or classic filmmaking. There should be no actual story content in an establishing shot, its just a teaser . . . I'm used to holding off the construction of an establishing shot until the very end.

And only recently, have I realized that this is probably a good habit . . . scenes are a lot like essays, they have an intro thesis rationale and summary. I feel like no writer knows what they're talking about until they've written the entire thing- and only THEN do they understand how to introduce you to what they're talking about.