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The New Narrative!

Abigail Lamb
Mar 6, 2019
3 min read

Above is the new script which I wrote after playing around with other narrative structures for this film.

I'm glad that I decided to go for such a large restructure because I think the film is a lot stronger for it. I really like that this version captures both the key points from the original narrative included - love and inspiration - and doesn't feel clunky or confusing. Plus it still allows me to have a fairly abstract scene without that taking over the entire story. I'm really pretty pleased with the outcome. I knew it was a better move by how fast I was able to pull material together after writing it. Within a week I had written the new story, redesigned the characters and completed the storyboards.

Storyboards -

When it came to storyboarding I had a good few things I wanted to work out this time around. I wanted to make sure I established and thought about the setting well, I wanted to make sure I set up the angles well and I wanted to make sure there was depth to the scenes.

In addition I began to play around with the idea of having the aspect ration change at certain points of the narrative to reflect the changing character state. It is worth mentioning that in the above boards scene 02 should also be in a 4:3 ration but I just forgot to make the boxes the correct size. The only scenes that are not in 4:3 are scene 03 and scene 06 which transitions to 16:9 by the end of the scene.

I will now talk through the boards, scene by scene.

Scene 01 - Scene one I wanted to open with a bit of an establishing shot where I tried a camera zoom in order to do something more interesting with the shot. It goes from a zoom where we can see the moon and the surrounding area to a shot where we can only see the character and her reaction. I want this shot to be a 180 when it gets close enough to the character. When we're zoomed all the way in we see the action playing out and then almost like a boomerang we zoom back out again.

between each of these I intend to have a scene heading with a new phase of the moon between them, marking steps out. This was a huge contributing factor to the decision to go with this concept. I came up with the 2 ideas independently however they fit together well and I got excited.

Scene 02 - second scene is pretty straight forward. Drop a few clues about collectors and artistic inspiration and idea development. then there's hints at an artistic process too.

Scene 03 - this scene is the first one to not be in the 4:3 aspect ratio. It breaks that and is in 16:9, hopefully to show that this is outside the reality of the narrative. We're now in a space that represents an artists inspiration. There's lightning which I hope represents the firing of synapses in the brain and allows the sculptor to create ideas. Then the stars that fall from the sky are the start of her inspiration. They represent the astronaut who is in space but this is not yet known to the audience. This scene isn't supposed to be obvious to the audience to start off with. Just an interesting and emotive interlude to the activity.

Scene 04 - A flurry of activity happens in this scene, mimicking the natural flurry of activity when anyone gets an idea and dives to play it out. There's not much to say about this scene. It ties in really close with the next one.

Scene 05 - Scene 5 follows on the next morning where she doubts her work from last night and returns to the drawing board after remembering her initial inspiration.

Scene 06 - Following on from this the final scene shifts in aspect ratio the closer the protagonist gets to the return of her partner from the moon. The lead is buried till almost right at the end. There's little hints in the statue being left right next to the moon but I'm hoping to lead you to believe that she's just collecting a moon rock, like she makes all her sculptures with but she isn't.

I'm really happy with this script and with the boards. I'm not usually very good at spaces and designing things but I'm pretty happy with a lot of the shot choices and pans and zooms and things. I've picked some angles that are evocative of old fashioned cartoons (e.g looney toons) as I am interested in bringing a notion of early cartoon and early cinema to this film. which is also there in the black and white and the aspect ratios.