Previsualization (also known as previsualisation, previs, previz, pre-rendering, preview or wireframe windows) is the visualizing of scenes or sequences in a movie before filming. It is a concept used in other creative arts, including animation, performing arts, video game design, and still photography. Previsualization typically describes techniques like storyboarding, which uses hand-drawn or digitally-assisted sketches to plan or conceptualize movie scenes.
Description
Previsualization’s advantage is that it allows a director, cinematographer, production supervisor, or VFX supervisor to experiment with different staging and art direction options, such as lighting, camera placement and movement, stage direction and editing, without incurring actual production costs. On larger budget projects, directors may previsualize with actors in the visual effects department or dedicated rooms. Previsualization can include music, sound effects, and dialogue that closely mimics fully produced and edited sequences. It is usually employed in scenes that involve stunts, special effects (such as chroma key), or complex choreography and cinematography. It also is used in projects that combine production techniques, such as digital video, photography, and animation, notably 3D animation.
Origins
Ansel Adams wrote about visualization in photography, defining it as "the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure.” The term previsualization has been attributed to Minor White, who divided visualization into previsualization, what occurs while studying the subject, and postvisualization, how the visualized image is rendered at printing. White said vizualization was a "psychological concept" he learned from Adams and Edward Weston.
Storyboarding, the earliest planning technique, has been used since the silent picture era. Disney Studios first used the term “storyboard” sometime after 1928, when its typical practice was to present basic action and gags on drawn panels, usually three to six sketches per vertical page. By the 1930s, storyboarding live-action films was common and a regular studio art department task.
Disney Studios also invented the Leica reel process, which filmed and edited storyboards to the film soundtrack. It is the predecessor of modern computer previsualization. Other 1930s prototyping techniques involved miniature sets that were often viewed with a “periscope,” a small optical device with deep depth of field. The director would insert the periscope into the miniature set to explore camera angles. Set designers also used a technique called “camera angle projection” to create perspective scene drawings from a plan and elevation blueprint. This allowed the set to be accurately depicted for a lens of a specific focal length and film format.
With the arrival of cost-effective video cameras and editing equipment in the 1970s, most notably Sony's ¾-inch video and U-Matic editing systems, advertising agencies began to use animatics regularly as a television commercial sales tool and to guide the ad’s actual production. An animatic is a video of a hand-drawn storyboard with very limited added motion accompanied by a soundtrack. Like the Leica reel, animatics were primarily used for live action commercials.
Beginning in the mid-'70s, the first three Star Wars films introduced low-cost pre-planning innovations that refined complex visual effects sequences. George Lucas, working with visual effects artists from the newly established Industrial Light & Magic, used footage from Hollywood World War II movie aerial dogfight clips to template the X-wing space battles in the first Star Wars film. Another innovation, developed by Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic, was shooting video in a miniature set using toy figures attached to rods, hand-manipulated to previsualize the speeder bike forest chase in Return of the Jedi. This allowed the film's producers to see a rough version of the sequence before the costly full-scale production started.
Francis Ford Coppola made the most comprehensive and revolutionary use of new technology to plan movie sequences in his 1982 musical feature, One From the Heart. He developed the “electronic cinema” process, making the animatic the basis for the entire film. Coppola gave himself on-set composing tools to extend his thought processes. The actors read the script dramatically in a “radio-style” recording. Storyboard artists then drew more than 1800 individual storyboard frames. The drawings were then recorded onto analog videodisks and edited to match the voice recordings.