My most recent update is the revisions I’ve made on my “He Was the Enemy” boards. I'll try to clean up more of them and post them again, but right now I only have the final 13 pages of boards up. After perusing the work of other storyboarders, I realize that my work lacks the readability that good boards have to have. And it’s not just that I need thicker outline contours on my characters (though that usually helps). I need economy of line with more interplay between straights and curves that give my drawings punch and action. People should want to look at the next drawing, not be intimidated that it may be hard to figure out what’s going on.
While I think my drawing in general has to improve, I liked a lot of the work I did for this script and I want to explain some of my thought process behind it. One of the first things I liked about this script was that it included some action scenes. These provided a great opportunity for me to gauge the action in a script and look for chances to show that drama and intensity visually. I knew that the final confrontation was really what I wanted the script to build up to. I wanted these men to look powerful, imposing, to come in abstract close ups and dangerous perspective shots. Carson had to soak up every threat and be scared into action. By placing the enemy soldiers at the top of a hill, the staging of the characters gave these men all of the power in the scene. They had to be mysterious and identityless; that’s what I perceived to be the theme of this script: that the enemy gains humanity through identity. Carson and Damon only feel the consequences when they know that this girl is linked to these men they have killed. Symbolically I tried to show that through the lack of faces on these enemy characters. They lurked in shadows for all of my boards with the sun behind them, allowing them to take on powerful, menacing black silhouettes while also being stripped of their faces in a way. The face becomes a symbol for identity and humanity. We only see these phantoms as men when the girl lifts off the helmet; she gives him his identity and now these enemies have become more than one dimensional monsters, but fellow men with lives, allegiances, and families. But this was Carson’s story at the end. I wanted Damon to fall out of the frame bit by bit so that this existed as a sort of nightmare for Carson. I like the level of thought I put into this script and I wish that I had this level of reading on every script I read. I hope the work conveys half of what I felt working on it. |
Brandt WongThis blog shows the progress and describes my thoughts on my most recent project(s). Archives
September 2019
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