Pictured above: a key storyboard moment + metaphor for me grinding away at this thing.
I’m currently writing this at Newmarket mall’s Coffee Club roughly an hour before I help with the Flicks preview screening of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day at Event Cinemas where I will be serving burgers to members of the audience. I will not be watching the film. I’ve got two games of turbo touch starting in roughly two hours.
Now that I’ve set the scene, I’m stoked to share a mini milestone: I’m 25% of the way through the script!
“Wait, you mean script-storyboard, right? Aren’t you doing those at the same time, Liam Maguren?” Great observation. But no, I’m not. At least, not as stringently as I planned.
It sure sounded like a great idea at the time. Write a scene, then storyboard the scene. Or, the other way around. Whatever felt more appropriate for the scene, according to my meticulously planned story sheet.
I said this in the previous newsletter:
Some scenes require me to write the script first then figure out the panel layout in the storyboard. Other scenes, typically those with no dialogue, benefit from a storyboard-first approach to visually map it out before vaguely describing those illustrations in the script.
Oh, how I admire the brazen confidence and authority of Liam from the foregone times of last month.
Thing is, I write a lot faster than I draw. Not a shocking revelation to anyone. However, I underestimated just how much this method would impact the flow and momentum of my writing. I’d hunger to continue with the next scene in the script only to stop and ponder if I should wait to storyboard the previous scene first. That would also mean doing the other 5 scenes I’ve yet to board.
I also realised that the boards I’d draw after scripting wouldn’t always follow the script 100% anyway. So screw it, I thought. I’m just gonna keep writing. The boarding can wait.
The 25% mark is significant because, with how this story’s structured, it’s the perfect point for me to pause the writing and catch up with my storyboarding. This is probably going to be how the rest of this process will work, but don’t quote me on that - I’ll be sure to quote myself again if this is contradicted.
This first quarter of the story covers my lead character Delilah’s primary school days, with the next three quarters covering three different ages in her life. They’re almost like short films, these quarters, but they thread in ways that become apparent in the end (that’s the idea, at least).
The storyboarding also made me realise the cinema conventions I’m ignoring to make the multiple panels motif work best. A big one, the 180-degree rule, doesn’t matter as much as where the panel sits in the frame. So if Delilah’s face is in the top-left, the camera can effectively be anywhere at any time as long as the panel stays there. Obviously, I’m not gonna go nuts for no reason, but it’s an example of how my thinking needs to shift from traditional filmmaking to maximise this panels idea and how it visually portrays Delilah’s OCD.
And a new problem’s surfaced that I’ll need to tackle: repetition. While it was easy to achieve variety in the panel layout for Big Questions (the damn thing’s only four minutes long), I’m discovering that it’s dangerously easy to use the same panel layout too often. Namely, three portrait panels side-by-side. Or two square ones, one on top of the other, with a massive square panel next to them.
Those particular layouts are quite good for simple scenes of dialogue that don’t require fancy blocking or whatever, but too many of them in too short a space of time sap the visual interest out of the whole thing. I’m considering introducing some new kinds of panels for each quarter (I’ve already got a tactic for the 4th quarter where Dee discovers alcohol) but more has to be done in this first quarter to ensure the layouts are different enough without being distractingly chaotic.
This could all work a treat or be an incomprehensible mess. To some degree, I have to rely on instincts over filmmaking “rules” which makes things super uncertain. But also, it’s kinda fun to strap on boots and venture into the unknown.
And I like that it’s fun. I’m using fun as a crutch to distract me from the HUGENESS of this whole journey. Because fun can be useful like that.