I Don't Like Sand.
Storyboarding Joseph: Light of Patriarchs
Hello There! Lindsey again - here to take you on a backstage tour of one of my favorite stages in directing a movie… Storyboards! Follow me back in time as I show you how our short film Joseph: Light of Patriarchs started to take it’s shape.
Step One: Watch a ton of movies!!!!
The best part of being a director is by far the fact that you literally have to watch movies. It’s part of the gig! Movies are a relatively new art form. Hollywood is only 100 (ish) years old. All great artists learn from the ones who came before them, and I knew exactly which great works of art I was going to turn to to get inspired to build the skeleton for Joseph. Before I divulge those epic films, let me set the stage and explain what a storyboard is:
STORYBOARDS:
In a stage play, a director will often plan out the movements and positions the actors will enact in order to make the story clear. Where you are on stage and where you are in relationship to the other people and set pieces communicate power dynamics, how a character is feeling, and guides the audience to focus on the right thing. In film and animation, the camera adds another element of controlling where the the audience looks and showing how the characters feel. The director (and cinematographer) “stages” each shot by creating storyboards. Storyboards are images (drawn or lifted from references) that communicate how each shot or beat of a scene will look before it’s filmed or animated.
Back to the studio! To plan the shots we were going to choose to tell this story I watched a lot of movies with a lot of sand… So much sand… I’m starting to believe there are no other landscapes in existence…I can literally feel invisible sand in my shoes from watching all this movies. I never thought I’d have anything in common with Darth Vader, but now (apparently) I do. Let me state for the record, after working on this movie for the last 6 months… I DON’T LIKE SAND!!!!
Prince of Egypt
Star Wars: A New Hope
Return of the King (does the gravel on the way to Mordor count as sand?)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
* It’s weird I didn’t watch Dune until sound design, but I digress.
”I don’t like sand. It’s rough, course, irritating, and it gets everywhere.” - Anakin Skywalker to Padme Amidala.
But I wasn’t just filling my belly with popcorn and when I watched these movies… I was filling my hard drive with millions upon millions of screenshots.
Step 2: Save a million screenshots
The amount of screenshots I have of people looking distressed in sand is astounding. Basically, as I watched these films, I noticed when a shot aligned with how I knew Joseph was feeling in our story. If it hit me in the heart, I took a screenshot. The next phase was to sort through the nearly 100 images I’d captured while watching this films. Here’s how the process went:
Capture 100 screenshots
Breakdown the entire script into beats (moments that are distinct and mark a change).
Sit with each beat and find a shot that most clearly communicates the tone and story point of that beat.
Make a beautiful board in Canva that organizes the crazy.
In a nutshell, I went from this:
To this:
Ahh…. Much better.
This was then handed off to the true mastermind, brilliant storyteller behind this film: storyboard artist Brandon Warren. (Thanks for Kamp Koral Brandon!)
Step 3: Draw Storyboards & Make Animatic
In the words of my good friend Ani…
Brandon and I had already had a blast working together on the previous two episodes of Songs of the Saints. This one was the most fun by far though, because it was cinematic! The characters’ feet were not going to be glued to the floor, and as we got to opportunity to make more complex shorts, this meant more complicated and thrilling boards! Brandon knew exactly what I was going for for the each sequence because he knew these movies well and the emotion that came through in each of these famous shots. He applied them to Joseph and made an animatic: a pre-visualization of a movie made by combining the dialogue/music and the storyboard images in sequence. It is in this stage that you really see where the story problems are and may have to revisit the script.
We loved the animatic and after a few tweaks, we were ready to bring Joseph to life in full technicolor and jump into animation!
To be continued…
Thanks for joining me behind the scenes on this backstage tour of Joseph: Light of Patriarchs! Stay tuned for more peeks behind the curtain and please subscribe and share.
It takes a village to make a movie and we need your help to bring Joseph to the small screen! Join us on the journey and help us finish the film by checking out our Kickstarter! Every bit helps and we’ve got some cool rewards to share with you as a thank you! Spread the word.
Christ be with you… Always,
-Lindsey
I loved reading this, Lindsey! 😄 So interesting about all of that background work you did.