Pre Winter Break
- Alisha Gupta
- Feb 13, 2022
- 2 min read
The first day introduced us straight away into what this unit would tackle and that was ‘Storyboarding’ and ‘Pre Visualization’. The first part dealt with choosing a script from the five given to us and within that narrowing the story arc down to five pages that would be the narrative we storyboard.
From this starting point I went over the scripts and avoided the Star Wars ones given since we were encouraged to choose material we were unfamiliar with and since I was very familiar with George Lucas’s work in the iconic franchise I put that down and instead picked up The Abyss (1999) since that was one I had never watched or heard of. Upon reading the script I wanted to pick a scene that had minimal dialogue and heavy action preferably that kept the pacing relatively fast so the viewer never got bored or lost interest.
Following this I went with the ending of the script that is the climax point of the film with a massive tidal wave beginning to engulf parts of the world and wreak havoc.
This process helped me identify three things. The first being the POA in each page which were the key Points of Action that needed to be highlighted to the viewer instead of dialogue. The second was to be mindful of where I placed my horizon lines as that dramatically changed the point of view of the scene.
The third was to play around with perspective, which I found was a feature I could experiment with as the narrative my script followed involved scenic shots and landscapes that gave me an understanding of filling up a screen space.
After I shared my chosen script, I proceeded to make thumbnail sketches on the script that were rough visuals to get my ideas flowing on paper instead of keeping them locked in my head.
During the following winter break I took advantage of one month slowly building reference material for each page based on the highlights I created on POA, dialogue and environment. Since my script heavily referenced real world locations and settings I needed strong material to rely on for my panels.
For this I divided references for anatomy that involved movement for scenes with people running in a folder, followed by places and historical events in another. This way once I did begin drawing out my panels I didn’t blank out with the progression of the story.
Drawing out the panels was a lengthy process that took a good few weeks and patience to complete because of the complexity of a few scenes I did hit a dead end in terms of visualizing it but the large number of references I put together for each page certainly did help.
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