Can't wait to see the final product dude!

Looking good ...doh! Pat beat me to it. Going back a few blog posts ... how do you guys come up with story-boards? God knows I try and it's a complete brick wall most of the time. When someone asks me how I make a sound or a beat, the usual answer is 'listen to what the track needs, make something fit' ... it's usually in reaction to what already exists ... but for visual stuff, it's more about planning than reaction and I find it bloody impossible. Maybe I should hire you guys to storyboard for me and I'll just react & shoot from those :)

That's not to say I don't have a final 'look' already in my head .. it's just the shot by shot breakdown of a video I find impossible. Any training pointers?

Storyboarding is an intense process. For most of the earlier work I posted, I didn't really storyboard heavily. I usually have worked similar to what you described. I have an idea and work towards that, but stay fluid and add/subtract/alter things as the idea develops. For this project we spent many hours brainstorming and sketching out ideas. Many of those ended up not being used. Once we had the initial idea, we came up with some roughly sketched storyboards. From there, we deconstructed the story to figure out what made sense, what didn't. Would we have the technical ability (and the time) to make an idea work? Then we drew up another, more expanded version of the storyboard. We had to make sure that the storyboard fit the song so that the timing would work and the imagery would progress along in a cohesive manner. It sometimes felt like you're spending time on nothing. So much is spent on drawing things that will never be shown to anyone but yourself and may never be used at all. However, all that planning really paid off. Having a detailed storyboard, the animatic and our shot list made production go much smoother had we not spent the time in pre-prod. It also helps to be able to sketch quickly. ;)

So the correct answer is 'time' ... damn ... I knew it :) Guess half my problem is the ideas I have are less visual and more story based, and I get stuck trying to figure out how to make things less literal ... for example: Guy making soup interrupted by phone call. Guy making his way down street. Guy making his way up to roof. All things that are required to set the scene, but really, how do you (a) pre-plan these things when most of the shots are decided for you by the nature of the once you get to location and even the lighting on the day and (b) one long shot (with cuts to speed it up) tells the story but having different angles and lighting and framing positions makes it more interesting to watch. Loads of films I know have a style which is technically very simple to mimic both in shots used and post ... I just can't seem to string all these together into one project. Time to look for a short course I think!!! I can sketchy badly, quickly :)