Good things

12 days till cameras roll. For the last few days we’ve been storyboarding. What is storyboarding? (I didn’t really know until a few weeks ago, so I’m going to assume that some of you don’t know either). Storyboarding is basically the act of drawing a picture for every shot that you’re planning to use during the film. Of course, before we did the storyboarding I really didn’t have a clue what shots I was going to use, so we hired a professional storyboarder and he sat down with me and made me work out my shots.

In total it took seven hours. Let me say that again, it took seven hours to storyboard a seven minute short. One hour per minute. And the final pictures haven’t even been drawn yet; those will be produced over the next three days.

Basically what we were doing was deciding what camera angles would best advance the script. We had to interpret the underlying meaning of every scene and then bring that out through the camera positions.

The thing is, the storyboarder is just going wild on this script. He loves it (something that I’m rather proud of) and has created two three-dimensional sets, using a computer program and Styrofoam.

The learning curve on this project has been quite tremendous. Numerous times during the last few weeks I’ve done things I’ve never done before, discussed things I’ve never discussed before and thought about things that I’ve never thought about before.

That is, of course, a good thing. The whole trip so far has had a pretty steep learning curve. In fact, I think I’ve changed a lot (I first wanted to write grown, but I’m not sure that’s the right word yet). A good mate from Singapore is going to meet me in Goa and I wonder if he’ll think I’ve changed. It will be interesting to bring something from my old life into my new one. It might be quite jarring, actually. Again, that’s a good thing.

I wonder what the future holds. I have no idea. Yet again, that’s a good thing.