This week I planned on finishing my storyboard for my film opening, but before doing so, we had a group meeting in class to completely flush out our ideas. I've been pretty self-conscious of my idea because I've gotten much of my inspiration from A24 movies: they make ordinary things seem interesting, but today, I got positive feedback from my peers. The one thing I felt conflicted about as I was developing my storyboard was how to introduce the mother in my opening and when would be a good time to do so. My classmate told me she liked my idea of portraying a familial relationship and it would be most effective to only show the mother towards the end to depict how disconnected the daughter and mother are, only seeing her on screen for merely 10-15 seconds. This enabled me to visualize my story's ending in a clearer fashion. One other concern my classmate brought up was how I would be sequencing the daughter's introduction as a character in order to make it feel interesting and personal. I was luckily already planning to show personal items to the character, like things in their room. Many psychology studies say that a person's room can tell a lot about their personality, which is why I found it appropriate to demonstrate that in my opening. My classmate affirmed that it was a good idea to show a glimpse of their personality through their room.
Going back to the topic of my storyboard, here's what I came up with:
I tried to visualize what I wrote in my stage directions for my screenplay and made some slight adjustments or additions to what's in the script. For the most part, I know exactly how I want my opening to be delivered. My favorite shot I came up with was taking advantage of the metal bed frame I'll be using to obstruct the shot, which symbolizes how Iris feels stuck in the same spot with her mother's relationship, or in other words, "trapped" with her own emotions. I'm such a perfectionist and spend more time than I need to on storyboards, but as long as I understand what's going on, it doesn't need to be the best drawings. It goes without saying that I'm not the best artist out there, but this gets the job done for me.
There are a few things I'm hoping to research this week to plan my opening more in-depth before going into production, such as lighting techniques or getting cinematography inspiration from films I already know. There's one shot in particular that's really calling out to me from a Studio Ghibli movie:
This is the opening scene of the movie Spirited Away, one of my favorite Hayao Miyazaki movies hands down. Here, the main character is moving to a new city and you see the cluttered mess in the backseat through the beautiful composition. The moving boxes on the right third and being used as a leg rest, the bags on the lower left third, and the main character still being the focus is right in the middle of the frame. I'm thinking of replicating this exact shot and perhaps adding another layer to my story by making it seem like my protagonist has just moved to this city. It makes sense as to why she wants her mom to be there for her first show in this new town as well.
I'll be going into the nitty gritty stuff of my cinematography inspiration in my next post for this week, so stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment