If i'm watching somebody else's project take shape, I find the most interesting thing to be the problems and screw ups; more importantly, how they're discovered and how they're fixed.

That being said, here's a bit of a screw-up; I was about to load up another corner with props (see bottom half of top photo). Then, it occured to me that I should really be framing this shot up with a scale armature stand-in. When I did that (via a crude drawing on a piece of balsa wood), I discovered that I would have been wasting my time. If I was to actually frame the shot up like I had it, it would only include the character's legs. And I felt like such a smarty-pants, designing things with my camera. After having made that discovery, I popped off about 80 shots, all with the character stand-in in them. How the set is actually going to be seen turned out to be quite a bit different than I was anticipating.

I've been carefully designing big pretty-looking wide shots. However, the average shot will have the camera jammed up pretty close to one wall or another; not much wide stuff going on. I then made a crude photo-storyboard for the first few shots of the first scene. Its quite ugly, but the ugly stuff tends to be where the important decisions get made.

This is very useful stuff; now I know what i'm actually going to be seeing, and from what angle. So now I can pretty them up, and avoid spending ages making scene compositions that'll never be seen.