Storyboarding
I'm working with Tom, Scott and other Adam. Our storyboard details the plight of a man in search of silence. This silence proves elusive, driving the man to a rather dramatic conclusion! (Scott said he'd scan and post the storyboard; I'll put a link here when he does.)
Actually we're not sure what the conclusion is going to be. The story is Adam S.'s brainchild; in his original conception, the short's protagonist ends up in the middle of the desert, jamming his ears with an ice pick. (Or something.) As it stands, we're unlikely to be able to film in the middle of the desert, so we'll have to find some other solution. (I suggested sneaking into the desert diorama at the Museum of Natural History but couldn't get sign-off from the rest of the group.)
The reading this week spurred my interest in storyboarding as an art in itself. It's mercurial. It inhabits an uneasy place between concept and execution. I like that its role can vary according to the project, the director, the studio, even the current phase of the production process. A storyboard can be purely visual, illustrating only mood, sets, costumes, etc., or it can be purely technical, giving shot-by-shot staging and camera directions, or it can be both of these things, or anything in between. I like the idea that there might exist any number of ad-hoc, formal languages for moving images that exist somewhere between the screenplay and the screen.
The other handout (In Search of Composition) was heavy. Not in the sense of dense, really, more just that it laid the truth bare. It was brutally honest about how film is essentially a deception, that our conventions for understanding film are learned and yet secretive and kind of manipulative. (There are lots of helpful hints in there, though, that I'm sure will be great for next week's assignment.)