Writing as a drawing tool - yeah, that sounds weird.
If you wanted to work with words, you’d be a writer, right? This isn’t beautiful
writing, though. This is organizational, planning writing that I’m going to
talk about. Writing out a scene beat by beat in order to outline an entire
story is a good way to better understand mechanics of visual story telling. (I’ve
re-written the previous two sentences for better clarity.)
Full disclosure: I’m
not a visual thinker. If I’ve only met you a few times, I recall you in terms of
a general impression and descriptive words. I have no picture of you in my
head. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve gotten this far in this field without a
mind’s eye, but using writing as an intermediary between intention and drawing
has helped me a lot. If you’re a visual thinker you probably have your own
methods of working, but either way I hope this is useful. When I jump straight
into boards or thumbnailing, it can be easy to get lost or forget the point of
view I intended to convey in the scene. When I work straight ahead in either
writing or boarding - it’s easy for me to go down the rabbit hole of
possibilities. The farther down the rabbit hole you go, the harder it is to
distinguish which choices are serving my goals, because this option is
awesome — wait, and this one is, too. All of them are interesting and worth
pursuing, and sometimes I forget where I was going in the first
place. While that exploratory work is useful, it can be deadly when I’m crunched
for time. Not LITERALLY deadly but, deadly to productivity for sure. So that’s
where writing comes in. When I write down where the scene should end up, what
each character is doing, that’s one thing I don’t have to constantly grip in my
mind. I’ve got it on my notepad, and my mind is freed up to explore within the
constraints I’ve set down. It all seems clear in my head, but it helps to write
it down. Seeing the whole thing down on paper gives me a good look at where the
disorganized areas are, so I can make adjustments. When I go straight ahead,
it’s easy to tell myself I’ll figure it out when I get there… but, this brings
me to another point: Writing is so, so much faster than drawing. I’m not talking
about flowery description. I’m talking about basic “she goes there, he feels
this, because of this she does that,” etc. You can knock this out in five
minutes. Even looking at the bare bones it’s easy to see where you’re losing
the spirit of your pitch. I’d much prefer to find out that I’ve lost the spirit
of my pitch in five minutes than an hour later, after thumbnailing the whole
thing.
Here’s another advantage: I can write down my plan,
approve of it in sound mind, and have that paper with my plan for the scene or
story written on it when I am:
•tired
•drunk
•in the throes of self-doubt
•seduced
by the compulsion to change everything at the last minute
•wondering whether
this was ever a good idea and what is on TV (very subtly different from the
throes of self-doubt)
If you’re not convinced, you’re not convinced. If you are,
here are some guidelines: When you’re beating out a scene, think about WHY the
audience is watching - like, what do they want to find out? Think about what
they probably EXPECT will happen (so you can support that) and what ACTUALLY
happens (so you can surprise them with it). Write down everything that happens
in the scene. Descriptive words help (because again, when you’re tired and
can’t decide what the acting should be, you can look at your descriptive word
and just do that).
•She looks up, confused.
•Above: wasp nest on a tree
•Wasps
buzzing around it
•She is horrified
•She runs
For an outline - for your whole
story - things are a little different. A general guideline I use for writing
out an outline is that each of the following gets a paragraph:
•the concept of
the story
•who the main character is
•what is her place in the world
•what goes
wrong (inciting incident)
•how does she try to fix it (act 1 break)
•brief
description of complications (act 2)
•what really goes wrong (midpoint)
•low
point
•resolution (act 3)
It seems counter-intuitive that almost half of the
outline would be setup for the story, and that the end would be just one
paragraph, but this really does work and make sense when you need to see your
whole story in just a few pages.So next time you have a story idea, try writing
some things down before you start sketching your favorite moments. Maybe you’ll
like it.
(I forgot where I found this tidbit of information but, it's definitely
worth including here. And, I’m not sure who to give credit to for writing this.)
I'm glad to have found this on my hard drive. Since then, I've saved this into the Adobe Flash document that I'm creating my storyboards in. Also, I have Mark Andrews Lecture Notes I copied from two YouTube videos in the same Flash document. If you'd like to see the videos and read my notes here are the links to them:
Mark Andrews Lecture part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmd7YIHUI5M
Mark Andrews Lecture part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ayjNzBnFXo
My Notes on These Two Videos (300dpi print quality)
http://bleu-rain.blogspot.com/2014/05/mark-andrews-cal-arts-lecture-notes.html
