I’m trying something different again.
To learn more about visual storytelling, i’m going through a movie and analysing it shot by shot. The analysis is in the form of a rough drawing indicating colour values (light/dark) and the arrangement of elements within the frame. If there’s some interesting acting going on within the same shot, i do gesture drawings of what the interesting character’s up to.
I’m also taking notes on dialogue, sound, music, story, edits and other interesting stuff i notice along the way.
Since i’m working back from a movie to a (rough) storyboard, i’m calling it “backboarding”.
The movie i’m starting with is 2001: A space odyssey. It’s one of my favourite movies so it’s one i’m already familiar with. I wanted to work with it because it’s an example of excellent visual storytelling and doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue. I’m a sucker for dialogue-free films.
So for every new shot, i pause the Blu-Ray and draw what i see. The process takes… well… i think i’ve put in about eight hours of work so far and i’ve only got as far as Dr Floyd getting grilled by the Russians. Even still, that’s 22 pages of pictures and notes with up to 9 storyboards per page rendered in graphite and ink.
The good part is that i’m learning a lot by watching the film extremely very slowly and attentively. Everyone knows about the famous match cut between the bone and the space station, but i found a great positional match cut during a reverse angle just a few shots beforehand when the bone-wielding apes are giving their opponent a savage beating. The impact of the blow is on screen exactly where you expect it to be exactly when you expected it, but the angle of the shot has reversed.
Cool trick, Stanley. Definitely borrowing it.
It’s also giving me a much stronger sense of how a movie flows along, sequence after sequence, shot after shot. The hows and whys. I watch other movies now and see how they could have told their story more strongly. It’s cool. Hope i remember all this stuff when it comes time for me to do the same.
So it’s been about eight hours of work to get half an hour into the movie, and it’s a 141-minute film. I can do about three hours of drawing a day before my hand gets too sore and my head gets too fuzzy to work. Extrapolating from that, that’s about another 80 pages of backboarding taking another 30 hours over another ten days – presuming i don’t get any quicker or develop any more stamina.
Hey, it could happen.
