“Storyboard Tales”—Online Short Videos With a Twist

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to make a micro-budget movie, especially a feature-length movie, after turning an idea into a shootable screenplay, it is the producing—assembling and coordinating the cast, locations, and props—that is one of the most difficult tasks.

Grand Forks moviemaker Les Sholes, whose feature debut “Ole and Lena” (2003) achieved a certain notoriety and widespread distribution in the upper Midwest, turned his focus the following year to creating a Guinness World Record-holding 7-second short with his epic World War II drama, “Soldier Boy.” Then in 2005 he made a serialized short spoof on Lewis and Clark, and tried his hand at some TV commercials the year after that.

But Sholes longed to make another feature, possibly another “reality-TV” style mockumentary, some other sort of comedy, or something in one of his favorite genres, the horror-thriller. “I wanted to do a full-length movie along that line,” he says. He found an aspiring screenwriter in Stockholm, Sweden, Henrik Holmberg, and started to develop a script for a thriller, but the results were never quite satisfactory for what Sholes had in mind.

Then Holmberg sent Sholes some short stories he’d done, and something clicked.

“I would rewrite it,” said Sholes. “I put a structure to them. He came up with the original idea for the story and I would write it.” Each story was a brief, independent dramatic vignette with some sort of surprise twist at the end, like the old TV series “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” Sholes said. “Sometimes it doesn’t have a good [happy] ending. The ending’s more dark.”

In their basic form, most lasted only about a half-minute to a minute, so Sholes considered doing a feature-length anthology. What he wound up with was 27 shorts totaling close to a half-hour with the credits.

“My original plan was to shoot them with actors, 10 to 15 actors,” Sholes said. Each actor would appear in several different shorts playing a different role each time. “The problem with being so many different ones was changing wardrobes, to get all the locations, and everything else.
Then I thought about doing them in photos.” Using still photos instead of video would reduce production time and editing time, saving costs.

Sholes figured he could save even more time and costs, as well as coordination hassles with actor and location availability, by simply shooting the storyboards and adding a voice-over narration. He found Tom Erickson, an NDSU architecture major whose work he liked, to do sketches from his rough storyboards and directions. Sholes said, “We’d converse back and forth, and on the internet, and he would draw them out.”

Then Sholes hired Royce Vollmer of R&D Voice Pros to do the narration, deciding to go without music or sound effects in order to keep the simplicity of the storyboard format.

“I really like these, the way they turned out,” Sholes said. “One of the reasons I wanted to do the short stories was because they’re short.” If they’re on Youtube and someone has a little free time, Sholes said, “I want them to go back and watch them again. You’ll have time to watch a couple and come back to them. If they’re longer, it’s harder. They’re written to draw you back in.”

The next step was to put together a website that would feature the shorts, so others could see them. On http://www.storyboardtales.com he’s divided 27 completed videos of roughly a minute each across a home page and three web pages of nine titles each. Since going on line last month, Sholes said he’s had about 1300 page hits, though he can’t tell how many times each of the individual movies has been viewed.

But working with Google AdSense helps him get a certain financial return, if small at first. “After the proper number of hits to the website,” Sholes noted, “it will be eligible for Google Video Ads, which would appear before each video.” He also hopes to partner with several video websites to help raise the number of hits.

Sholes said he’d eventually like to get to the point where he’d post a new movie each week to encourage return visits. “I’ve got about five more I’m writing. Some of the ones I didn’t use, I’m going back to… I’d like to get nine more out there. Two are already done and I’m working on two others.”

He plans to continue the storyboard style for the present, but “If there’s a demand, I could go back and shoot them with actors. There’s a possibility.” Some could even be combined and fleshed out into longer shorts or a live-action feature with an existing story serving as the “payoff” for a more complex setup and development.

If these Storyboard Tales start to take off, Sholes said, he’d like to start up a completely different series of short storyboard-format movies, maybe two or three, to create an on-line network with new episodes in each series each week. “I’d like to do a series of these, like an actual series, a sitcom, with the same characters” in the episodes, instead of having independent, stand-alone stories.

“I’ll probably keep going on this. I put two years into 27 minutes,” said Sholes, and reiterated how pleased he is with the outcome of the project. “My first love is a full feature, no comparison, but it’s kind of fun with these that I can do one and go on to the next one.”

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