Shaping a Story: Creating a Storyboard

 

Approach

In approaching the storyboard for this project, initially I attempted to draw the storyboard digitally on my (very new!) iPad with my (very new!) Apple Pencil, but quickly got frustrated with the process and didn't feel it was necessarily helping me to generate or develop ideas for the montage. For a day or so I switched to hand drawing the storyboard on a Rocketbook (to make it clear for digital upload) but I faced similar frustrations with my lack of drawing ability, so shifted over to Canva.com where I found a template I could work with. 

This was a useful shift not only because it gave me an exemplar for a storyboard that I felt worked well with my thinking around the project, but also afforded me access to a library of images that inspired my thoughts and helped me develop my ideas further.

Process

I began by dividing the poem into lines I wanted to develop visually in the montage (bold text under image frame), and first inserted the image in Frame 5 which is a composition I had used for another project using play therapy figurines made by a Ukrainian couple at podoba.com (it's my own photograph).  

I spent quite a lot of time looking for a suitable image of feet to begin the title slide, and searched on a number of image engines for what I wanted, which was more like a close up of a person walking barefoot in a beautiful garden at night, but this was the best I could do. I then begame to populate the frames with photographs that indicated the general tone and atmosphere I wanted to achieve, before writing text to refine what I wanted to look for in searching for video clips. 

Wendell Berry wrote this poem in the late 1960's, and while it hints at McCarthyism and state surveillance of the individual in previous decades, it equally points to the developing sense that individual self-awareness and self confidence could buffer against harmful social narratives that "otherised" anyone "different". 

 My aim in the first six scenes, so,  was to set a scene that combined elements of entrapment, persecution and surveillance.  I wanted a slightly unsettling, hopeless feel, aiming to convey this through black and white imagery and quite stark, unequivocal, slightly claustrophobic imagery. I included the sunrise behind the barbed wire as a contrast to increase the pathos evoked by the suddenness of suddenly "being found out" at the moment you were about to escape.

Perhaps it was just the proximity of the assignment deadline to Hallowe'en, but I wanted a sense of "ghosts of the past" to signal the shift to "and you will know that they have been there along".. at this point in the poem, I often wonder who "they" are, and what and why "their eyes" would be on anyone's letters, books or have their hands in your pocket. There's a paranoia in this image as well as a sense of resignation, that often makes me wonder if "they" are critical voices and harmful narratives that, in a sense, shape our personalities and the faces we prepare to meet the other faces that we meet.

In Frame 9, I wanted to shift to something earthy and ancient. I was thinking here of America of the 1960's as a time of personal, spiritual and sexual revolution, and a huge time of shift and change for women. The words "though you have done nothing shameful, they will want you to be ashamed" brought Medusa to mind as an archetype of the "shamed woman" who did nothing shameful, but was outcast from society for a man's response to her beauty and sexuality by her sister Athena, who had sprung from the head of Zeus (e.g. who was not of woman born). In Jungian psychology, Athena represents formal knowledge, intellect and logic, while Medusa represents the body. I wanted a red, flickering, warm, intimate ancient feel here - hidden and earthy.

Frame 10 shifts to a more modern iteration of attempts to suppress women's freedom and sexuality with an image of intimate partner violence, before reverting to a more elaborate and formal image of Medusa, fully entrapped in a wall. I edited this image in Canva, combining it with a flickering black and rainbow overlay that brought to mind that early childhood art activity of drawing rainbow stripes and covering them with black crayon, then scraping off parts to reveal the colours beneath, which  brought to mind childhood with respect to the line "then such light as you have made in your history will leave you". For Frame 12, I had found a little video of my son splashing in a puddle that I always think of in terms of the absolute joy and light of childhood, when we are totally free of shame and experiencing life fully (whatever the weather) but for narrative continuity wanted to use a female child at this point.

As the poem begins to work to a resolution, I wanted a shift from the light of the freedom of childhood to those experiences many of us have early in life where we pick ourselves back up after hurt and then sometimes pursue things that continue to hurt us, particularly where we "learn to manage" ourselves in ways to gain approval. I love the line "they will not forgive you" in its resoluteness - it is the voice of wisdom, that masking true aspects of yourself to gain belonging can never lead to true peace of mind.

Frame 15 here is a person who has learned to face down the aspects of themselves that are not truly who they are, and can sit with both internal criticism and difficult encounters with others with a sense of assurance that they are fundamentally whole and worthy of dignity and respect.

The final two frames will be longer shots, leading to the primary message of the piece: "I am not ashamed", and the sense of freedom of the heron beginning "his evening flight from the hilltop". 

A full PDF of the Storyboard for this project is available here.