This is a snippet of a screenplay I am writing and working on. To the surprise of no one who knows me, I'm a big fan of Tarkovsky, Kelly Reichardt, and many others who excel at Slow Cinema and I especially enjoy it when movies are able to slow down and let things run naturally and methodically. As much as I love animating complex dance sequences, action scenes, fights, and using crazy cinematography, there is something truly special when a director doesn't feel like they need to "show-off" to the audience.
The experiment I wanted to do with this storyboard was to see how much story and acting could I get from a nearly static shot of a character's face. Everything about their surroundings, world, and life needed to be inferred through off-screen dialogue and references. My main goal was to make sure that the audience connected with a kid who doesn't feel like he can move and interact with his surroundings but then throw the audience into a POV tracking shot where they are able to directly interact with everything and are given freedom. The original storyboard for this was a 14 minute long tracking shot full of action, dialogue, mystery, and many other "nifty" elements, to really juxtapose the character's VR life against their bed-ridden life... however, with no one financing that, it will take a long time to get a 14 minute tracking shot done on my own.
This project was a lot of fun because the Director needed the movie to be able to be made on a minimal budget but still maintain fantasy elements. To do this, a lot of the scenes needed to feature characters in silhouette, or scenes with extensive use of shadows. This meant that when storyboarding the project I had to reference a lot more "surrealist" films and movies from the 1920s to get a better idea on how to get ideas across effectively with the minimal amount of lighting and prop requirements, and keeping in mind that a lot of shots would require miniatures to be composited into the foreground or background. When taking this into consideration, all of the shots were designed to work within a tight budget while still maintaining a high level of visual intrigue. The limitations of the project made it a lot more fun to work on because it (surprisingly) gave more freedom for experimentation.
I tried to make sure that every second (even if there was no movement) was entirely intentional, reasoned, and will help further advance the protagonist's character arc. Part of the fun of presenting this project to people is that I get wildly different reactions: Some people get INCREDIBLY bored, while other people get INCREDIBLY invested.
A chapter 2-3 is in the works.
The experiment I wanted to do with this storyboard was to see how much story and acting could I get from a nearly static shot of a character's face. Everything about their surroundings, world, and life needed to be inferred through off-screen dialogue and references. My main goal was to make sure that the audience connected with a kid who doesn't feel like he can move and interact with his surroundings but then throw the audience into a POV tracking shot where they are able to directly interact with everything and are given freedom. The original storyboard for this was a 14 minute long tracking shot full of action, dialogue, mystery, and many other "nifty" elements, to really juxtapose the character's VR life against their bed-ridden life... however, with no one financing that, it will take a long time to get a 14 minute tracking shot done on my own.
This was a "triptych" set-up, like that used in Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) where he would strap three cameras together to achieve a 4:1 aspect ratio for really wide shots, or use it to great effect in montage sequences where there needs to be a juxtaposition of multiple ideas and images as the same time. This current experiment is unfinished and it is much more animated than a storyboard should be, but I needed the timing to be very precise to see if the triptych set-up is viable for future projects and experiments. I definitely had a lot of fun researching and messing around with this because it requires three times as many shots and an exponentially higher focus on the precision of the edits and when the edits take place due to the fact that not all of edits happen at the same time.
What I learned from this: A triptych set-up is VERY viable for further storytelling scenarios. The advantage it has over a single camera set-up or a diptych set-up (which has been done before) is that one can directly contrast images and ideas at the same time and have information conveyed in a much more "symbolic" or metaphorical way. The audience already understands that we are seeing multiple images of different events at the same time so they are forced into a mindset of interpretation and active involvement instead of being in the mindset of passive interest.
The downside with the triptych set-up is that it requires infinitely more work and trickiest part is making sure the audience's eye is going where you want it to go. Elements like visual contrast, motion contrast, line-direction, color, timing, and many others all need to work together to guide the eye from one frame to another and still work within the single frame.
This project was a lot of fun because the Director needed the movie to be able to be made on a minimal budget but still maintain fantasy elements. To do this, a lot of the scenes needed to feature characters in silhouette, or scenes with extensive use of shadows. This meant that when storyboarding the project I had to reference a lot more "surrealist" films and movies from the 1920s to get a better idea on how to get ideas across effectively with the minimal amount of lighting and prop requirements, and keeping in mind that a lot of shots would require miniatures to be composited into the foreground or background. When taking this into consideration, all of the shots were designed to work within a tight budget while still maintaining a high level of visual intrigue. The limitations of the project made it a lot more fun to work on because it (surprisingly) gave more freedom for experimentation.
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