PART 2 - STORYBOARDING FOR FILM, TELEVISION AND MULTIMEDIA

Picture stories are easily accessible, crossing time, cultural and language barriers. In cave paintings we see images an artist made of himself hunting animals for food, some with multiple legs to indicate movement; these are images derived from action and a desire for understanding, the artist and painting were revered.

Papyrus scrolls like the Egyptian Book Of The Dead (circa 1500 BC) are an example of an 'illustrated manuscript', the earliest being a fragment of Homer’s Iliad, in the Ambrosian Library of Milan. In 1067, the 230 foot long hand-embroidered Bayeux Tapestry represented the Norman Conquest of England in a detailed pictorial narrative.

ART TEACHES US: Drawing teaches us to see, music teaches us to move, architecture answers our need to protect ourselves. Great cathedrals, museums and galleries have been built to house the visual record of our history, creating spaces of visual and textual information, all of them attempting to answer questions about reality and existence.

Yet now we live in a time of technological and spiritual crisis, when even the truth we see with our eyes may be false.

Louis and Auguste Lumière were pioneers of film in 1895, exploring the technical attributes of the camera and its artistic possibilities, creating a dialogue of REALISM that has been a crux of cinema as distinct from the fantastic film tradition of Georges Mélièrs. The first experiments by Louis Lumière showed everyday events. His silent film The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895) showed a train arriving diagonally across the screen, causing panic in the audience.

“Not only does it enable us to capture movement in its various stages, but we can recompose it at will, since the crank is hand-operated. Motions can be slow, very slow if we wish, so that no detail escapes our attention; and then, subsequently, we can accelerate it, should we so desire, back to normal speed. We shall then possess absolutely perfect reproduction of real movement.”

Louis Lumière, The Cinematograph, La Nature, 12 October 1895. In Auguste and Louis Lumière. (Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, ed.) Letters. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. p.302.

NIGHTMARES, DADA and POP CULTURE: In 1915 the poet Apollinaire created Graphemes, visual representations of objects and ideas made out of words, written in the shape of the things they spoke of. In the 1930’s anti-Nazi Superman comics hit America while Dadaists like Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp were involved in a subconscious, transfigurative visual alchemy, creating 3D metaphorical images that correspond with modern ideas of an information space.

On October 30th 1938, a Mercury Theatre radio show, orchestrated by Orson Welles and based on H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1898), convinced over a million Americans that an actual Martian attack was taking place in New Jersey. The actor Frank Readick, who played 'reporter-on-the-scene' Carl Phillips, based his emotional tone on the broadcast account of the Hindenburg Airship disaster, causing mass hysteria and an actual 'Martian-Hunt'. The success of this 'reality' radio-play was the reason RKO films granted Orson Welles total creative control over his first motion picture Citizen Kane, which itself revolutionised the art of visual storytelling.

At the same time, photographer Arthur Fellig, (a.k.a. Weegee, the phonetic spelling of Ouija board, so nicknamed for his 'psychic' ability to be at a crime scene before the police). He had a darkroom in the boot of his car and used flashbulbs to capture grim images of murder and mayhem in New York. He sometimes arranged evidence to make his pictures more saleable, and his work had a strong influence on crime films of the period, later to be called 'Film Noir' by the French new wave in the 1950's.

Also in the 50’s, Abstract artists like De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock dispensed with traditional representation, while 1960’s Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg began to 'acquire/explode' commercial imagery from newspapers and comics, reproducing multiple artworks with photographic and screen-printing techniques. In literature, the anti-authoritarian text terrorist William S. Burroughs worked to advance freedom of thought, his 'cut-ups' allowing multiple perspectives and intersection points. They originated in 1959 when his partner Bryon Gysin accidentally cut through the columns of a newspaper, making holes in the text, creating the first hypertextual poetry and rearranging meaning as collage.

"Scrapbooks are such stuff as dreams are made of. Fill in a page in time, glue in a letter or a news clipping from an old town, add a photo, then record the scrapbook’s opening times and locales. They make us aware of what we know, and also what we do not know that we know. Word begets image and image is virus. Get it out of your mind and into the machines."
William S. Burroughs

TODAY: All stories and art forms play on our emotions and deliver meaning. Digital media presents a revolutionary art form that draws on all previous mediums, creating powerful new hybrids like online gaming and immersive cinema, ideally designed to nurture, protect and entertain us in the modern 'information' age. As chaos theory and fractal geometry illustrate our minds connection to the Sub-atomic/Cosmic universe, the electricity inside a computer can extend the electrical systems inside the human mind. So now the content of our stories and artwork can transcend entertainment and education, exploding preconceptions of character, narrative, subject and genre.

Words and images are everywhere, and still the metaphorical associations of the artist are what we all need to help us understand what we are experiencing. Interactivity has the potential to expand the limits of our understanding, but it is extremely complicated to plan.

Anything goes in cyberspace; not everything should be permitted, but anything is possible.

With practice, actual human interaction using computers can become an instinctive, organic response in real time, potentially offering unlimited possibilities to aid our everyday lives – from chat rooms, to a child learning the alphabet, or an elderly person shopping for a wheelchair. No matter how mundane, these activities should always offer a memorable experience for the user.

“In times of radical change, it’s the mutants that make the difference."
from Viva Zapata, a 24 hour action by electronic disturbance theatre Floodnet.com

COLLAGE (CUT UP, FOLD OUT & POP OVER) TECHNIQUES: We’ve all experienced assemblage and collage as art or in a kid's scrapbook, but when applied to research and development collage can convey an extraordinary range of information. Since the subject matter of storyboards (especially in multimedia) can be derived from any previous media, how do we best describe the planning and construction of a proposed presentation?

Collage has many uses in this process, and creative directors in advertising agencies use tear sheets (relevant pages torn from magazines as basic reference for a proposed job) to construct simple style guides to reinforce their preliminary planning notes. From these abstract beginnings, storyboards, timelines, flowcharts and the organisation of multimedia assets can be represented as pages, slide shows, or prototype interactive storyboards. Selection of materials and activities should always be in keeping with the subject, or it may disturb your clients.

In multimedia, writers should be 'visionary', even if they are not artists. They must write about what the audience is SEEING, FEELING, HEARING, etc; then let trained artists do the storyboards.