Sketchbook storyboard
Bri ef
Make a storyboard in whatever form that suits you. The result should be narrative, but it does not have to consist of the traditional series of squares.
first t h oughts
I had quite a hard time to collect my thoughts and come up with something new while working with this project. In the beginning I was too stuck with my old ideas from the book intervention project (where I made a map over the different links and subjects I could reach by googling “google”), that mostly consisted of thoughts about internet, the real meaning of words, roads and links in different shapes. I knew that I had to connect the storyboard to the book project somehow, but it should be able to stand on its own too, and be an own project, not just the same idea as the old one but in a new shape. After a while I started to think much about history, because all the events in history are linked to each other. I thought about the history of feminism (at this time I had just discovered a blog about feminism that gave me a lot of ideas and new thoughts), the history of an equal society and the evolution. It was meant to be shown in some kind of an information graphic style, but I could not really come up with what I wanted to say with all this, it felt a bit empty. I stopped thinking of the content of my storyboard and focused on the physical form instead, just to rest from the content a bit. I came up with the idea to make some kind of a “moving” storyboard, like a deck of cards or a puzzle that the viewer has to put together on his or her own leading to that all the stories will be different. I tried to connect this to my earlier thoughts about roads and evolution.
M a k in g a presen tati on
To get going with the project, we had to do a presentation of our ideas in class. Because of this I had to structure all my thoughts and ideas that I had in mind, and while doing that I came up with a new idea. I was still a bit stuck with the roads and maps that I used in the book intervention project, but now I also started thinking about people linked together. The “six people theory” or “six degrees of separation” fascinates me, and I did some research to learn more about it (the theory is based on the idea that it is only six persons between you and anybody else in the world. Through connections etcetera, I should theoretically be able to say “hello” to Dalai Lama by only passing my “hello” via five persons). I still liked the idea of the audience having to put the story together, but I did not know how to combine the “six degrees of separation” with that.
T h e t wo id e a s pt. 1
I had a lot of ideas but none of them felt like a winner so I sat down again, trying to define what I was going to do. My class mates had given me some ideas after my presentation, which I tried to work on with. One of them was to do a kids game where you fold a paper and make choices to get into the middle of it where something is stated (it is called “loppa� in swedish), an idea I really liked but with one disadvantage - you have to be two people to make it work, what if you are alone watching my storyboard? Being stuck in my thoughts again, I made a list of mediums and ways to communicate the story I wanted to tell. The list contained mediums like web, posters, magazines, illustrations, rubik’s cube, patterns, collage, blog, tattoos, etcetera. I chose the medium illustration (because I like to draw and I would like to develop that skill of mine) and got the idea to make a series of illustrations, each in an own frame, that all should fit together somehow, no matter what order you would put them in, and therefore tell different stories depending on how and in what order you put them in. The illustrations could be of people, roads, places or maybe telephones.
t h e t wo id e a s pt. 2
I was pretty sure of this idea, until I all of a sudden came up with a new idea while working with the first one - the Mix Max game. Mix Max is a board game that consists of cards with different characters on. However, the characters are not in one whole piece, they are divided in different parts (hat, head, body, legs) and therefore they can be combined in a number of different ways which creates new characters. My idea was therefore to make an own Mix Max version which I found quite suitable for both my earlier thoughts and the book project. The different characters are all linked together by their body parts, and by putting them together in different combinations you create new links, and new looks which all tells us something. We all have prejudices about people based on how they look and behave, and in our heads we create a story from what we can see in a person. Further more, every person is a story because we have all lived our lives in which things have happened. In this idea I could therefore incorporate both the links-idea, the deck of cards-idea, and the six degrees of separation-idea (I would of course make six different characters) in one single way.
in spirati on
To get some inspiration of what kind of style I wanted to capture in my illustrations I looked up some pictures that I like. The two top ones and the two to the left are made by Stina WirsĂŠn, a swedish illustrator who both illustrates for big newspapers, does her own children books, and much, much more (like the stamps as you can see at the picture on the top). I like her style because of the way she uses colours. She does not only colour the parts that “shouldâ€? be in colour, she lets the colour float out and become a new dimension of the illustration, it gives the picture depth and a feeling of texture, which I like. I also like the very graphic and simple style that the other two pictures represent. There is only two colours (black and white) and a lot of tiny lines, and yet the pictures feels very alive and vivid. I do not know who has made these illustrations since I found them at Pinterest.com.
t h e work in g process
I started to list attributes, names, personalities to get some ideas for what kind of persons or characters I should draw. I chose some of the listed words, and started to measure and sketch different figures. The hard thing was to make them all have the same measurements so they all could fit together. When I was satisfied with all the sketches, I filled the lines with a fine line pen and scanned the pictures into my computer where I coloured them in Photoshop. I chose to only use one colour for each character to enhance their personality and to make the pictures less messy and also to make it clear that all the different parts belongs to one certain person. I printed the pictures, first in the school library to check that everything seemed to work out the way I wanted it to, and then on a thick paper (200 gram) in the printing room to get as good quality as possible. The prints turned out just the way I wanted them to, both regarding colours and the quality of the paper etcetera, so I was really happy with them. I used a scalpel to cut the pictures into the three parts I planned them consist of - head, torso and legs. Then I took a big paper and cut out square holes in it, where the character parts would fit, like some sort of a frame or passpartou. On the backside of the holes in the big paper I glued paper strips in which I could slide the character body parts cards.
r e sult: every person is a story
The result could be likened with a poster with the special feature that you can change the motif depending on what you feel like that day. If you change the motif, the story that the storyboard tells will change too. Every person has a history and therefore every person is a story. If you create a new character by combining the cards, you also create a new story. Thus, this storyboard contains 216 stories that can be changed and altered just the way you want them to.
s i r i esk i l so n a dva nced v i su al c r eat i v i t y UWS 2013