PINEWOOD STUDIOS (Workshops)
UAL Central St Martins (Lecturer)
Drama Centre, London (Tutor)
London Film School (Workshops)
Storyboards
In 2006 I started teaching Storyboard Drawing for Directors at Drama Centre London, this performing arts school was founded in the 1930s and many known British actors graduated from their programmes. The school created a directors programme and I taught this technical course for BA and MA directors in their first year.
We looked at how a cinema or theatre director can be inspired by the world of culture from Paleolithic cave painting to current art practice, including the outrageous, sexual and shocking no holds barred from contemporary and historical art. Famously, the cinematographer Jack Cardiff surrounded himself with prints from museums of the history of art to understand how artists represented light throughout the history of art.
This same course I began to teach at London Film School. Then, Drama Centre London was brought under the umbrella of University of the Arts London Central St. Martins and I continued to teach this same course. The storyboarding process was essential so the director understood composition and framing and could pass this creative process on to people operating cameras and lights. A single scene is notoriously expensive to set up, so this process makes it understandable to everyone. For the last 100 years there are very good examples of storyboards from the silent era of film to the present and in class we would look at these drawings in detail. We also looked at clips of films from all eras and from all parts of the world, so the students could see a very broad selection of the experimental, documentary, period, historical and contemporary films.
For the past couple of years I have been teaching a technical storyboarding course at Pinewood Studios, Creative Media Skills Institute, a school set up by Ailie Smith, who saw the crucial nature of entirely practical technical courses to get students into all departments within the film industry.