HOW STORY CAME TO BE (Pre-story)
- Abigail Lamb
- Dec 6, 2016
- 4 min read
As I previously mentioned this story has gone through many incarnations since I first came up with the idea. So I wanted to show you some of the storyboard snippets from those earlier versions of the story and talk about why I didn't use them or why I went a different way with the story.
To begin with the story was about musical plasma that was found in space. That when the spaceman ran his hand through it, music would sound and he would write a song with it. It was a much more confusing idea and when I came to board it I hadn't even completed the idea in my head I didn't just not have all the kinks worked out, I had huge gapping holes in my narrative but I thought maybe I would work some of them out when I got into the boarding.
So before I get to the boards I wanted to talk about mind maps. These two are a visualisation of a lot of the things I was thinking about inside my notebook, I tried it out so I could see where similar ideas were grouping and see if that helped me think of anything. It also allowed me pretty freely to scribble things out without worrying about the implications too much. I made one right back after I scrapped my initial idea and one when I was stuck for a solution.
The first board in the examples above is a very rough board I made a very long time ago now. It was my hope that by beginning to try and board early on I would have some insight into how things would work. But more so I was testing to see how easy I would find creating this story. I was specifically looking to identify issues and problems. I was having a lot of problems with the idea at this point, I was trying to storyboard to see if things would flow any easier when I began. Alan had advised me to just begin by boarding anything I saw in my head and I was finding it very difficult to get this image of Lute floating through cloud like fog out of my head. So I began boarding it. As I expected to, I hit a lot of story roadclocks with this idea pretty early on, Which is why there are so few examples of boards from that period in Dissonances development. It was just disasterous. Admittedly for a while I was pretty scared. But I think that was just the daunting nature of a project of this scale.
The second storyboard above is from my pitch, it's a very fast storyboard that covers the whole story in very few squares. As you can see by this stage I was drawing Lute so frequently that I had come up with a comfortable design for him. They style was falling in to place far more and I had come up with the end of the story.
The story now goes:
Lute is in a spaceship playing his music box.
Spaceship crashes
lute looses musicbox in space and crash lands on a small planet
Lute goes through several notation recording processes such as moving rocks and scribbling in the sand to remember his tune.
Lute gives up and slowly lies down on the planets surface.
He is blinded by a bright star in the sky and it is reflected in his visor.
He reaches his hand up to block the shine and the light shines through his fingers and creates stave lines on his helmet.
Lute realises something and takes his hand away to test his theory and back again.
He then grabs some dirt from the ground and rubs it on his visor to forn the same lines as his hand had before him.
We see from his POV that the lines align with the stars and form a rhythm on the staves.
He begins to hum the melody and we hear the song his music box used to play.
We leave Lute sitting on the planet humming out the melody he is now pleased to have back.
As we pan away we realise that the blinding star that got him thinking is actually the main mechanism from his music box.
The middle storyboard shows this narrative out in a few very short shots. At the time I made this I hadn't storyboarded a lot of the film out and this was a hugely helpful part of the process because it let me look at the whole narrative I had planned in just key moments. It felt a bit like keyframing a motion and I don't understand why I had never done it before. It gave me a change to look at the rhythm and beat of the whole story without committing to creating an entire boarded story.
In this version of the board and the one that follows I have began to introduce the use of POV angles, which are very important to the telling of the story. Lute is alone and the more often we see how he sees the more often the audience will identify with that.
That leads me on to the final board. This was the first time I sat down to properly think about the boards. I explained each shot, with both why I am showing you that thing and why am I showing you it that way. I think it was good for me to start thinking about the patterns I'm drawing in the film early on because then I can either maintain them or break them depending on the narratives needs.
