Jennifer had said that with film, and with the length of film I'd be making (short!), I needed to make sure I was clear. I needed to have an opinion and communicate it without an subtleties. She said that it probably wouldn't work to say something like:
This worked because of blah blah blah. And this didn't work because of blah blah blah.
I couldn't go back and forth. She said it might be best to be one or the other about the performance. Did it or did it not work? And nothing in-between.
She asked what I thought the drafting process would look like. And I told her that I aimed to first write the review. I wanted to do this because writing helps me think and narrow down my ideas. I knew that writing a 500-700 word review would allow me to draft my ideas in a narrative that made sense to me. After writing those 500-700 words, I'd be able to get the jist of my opinion in just a few key sentences. Many times, it's only in the process of writing something big that I figure out how to articulate my points. I explained to Jennifer that this piece of writing would be a draft of my storyboarding process. I decided to call the written review my written storyboard.
There were many drafts leading up to the final draft of the written storyboard. When I was happy with the written draft, I showed it to Teal and Anna. They were surprised that, on my way to a visual outcome, that I would begin by writing. I didn't and still don't understand their surprise. I've always seen that 'text' as a step in the translation. I saw the ballet. I needed to verbally respond to what I saw. You could say that it's a very detailed script. Not all of what is written will show up visually in the film.
It allowed me to do what we talk a lot about in class: Zooming in and zooming out during the research process. Writing the review enabled me to zoom in on my opinion and give reasons for it. After the review was written, I started to view the draft not as a text, but as an image to be read. I zoomed out — way out — and looked for my main points.
I extracted those main points onto a sheet of paper.
Without the extra text around those main points, they told a more succinct story. It was a story that made my visual (more conventional) storyboarding process much easier. I cannot think of another way I would have reached the messages I wanted to convey other than doing the writing first. Although I had been thinking about the footage I wanted to include while working on the written storyboard, I realized that the images I included in the written storyboard might not work on film. This wasn't something I stressed out about. I thought about my conversation with dance critic Sarah Kaufman. She said that when she writes about a performance, she'll take pages of notes, but normally she doesn't use any of them in the final piece. The final piece is a summation of her main point and what stuck with her afterwards. Maybe a few of those scribbled notes find their way in, but most of the time, they are the sum of a larger part. I see the written storyboard in this way. It was part of my note-taking and scripting process. It allowed me to see the larger picture and to articulate what exactly it was I wanted to say. Whether or not the actual images I describe or exact words I use make it into the film doesn't matter. The written storyboard was a necessary step to zoom in and out, and for me, it was a crucial step in thinking visually.
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