Storyboardin'

To break the unbearable monotony of multiple projects mostly involving soft returns and clicking buttons on the InDesign toolbar, we got to actually MAKE some integrated design things with movie titles and colour and images and any type styles we wanted and everything! It was about as exciting as finding a desert oasis with not only a fresh spring but also a doughnut tree and a traveling burlesque troupe, let me tell you.

We even got to pick our movie. Obviously, those with bad or non-existent title screens were best, giving us a lot of indie and lower-budget fodder to use. As a design class in Madison, everyone is a little bit hipster anyway, so it was unlikely we'd have all picked summer blockbusters. But of course someone picked Requiem for a Dream, and someone picked Wristcutters, and a few people had french films, and a few more had hilarious B-movies. One had Elvis and samurai, for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

I picked Equilibrium, which, if you've never seen it, is a generic distopian future with a monolithic and fascist government which suppresses all emotion through drugs and 451-type Firemen, a ragged but inspirational underground which tries to save art and passion (via acting bohemian, I think), some guys with a sweet and nonsensical martial art involving guns, Christian Bale, and a lot of blue filter.

Someone last semester had done a godawful job on an Equilibrium storyboard and I figured it'd be nice to be compared to something that was really that awful...I could only come out looking better, even if I died mid-project. It was...all these primary colours, right? With...bubbbles? And not much text at all, and I guess the bubble colour things were behind glass that was starting to crack? I guess? As a metaphor it's pretty weak, and the colours and bubbles were so totally wrong I had to wonder if they had ever seen the movie.

Not that the original is much better. It has a voice-over talking about WWIII with some stock footage from WWII of grainy atom bombs and Stalin and stuff. There's a bit with a second of the Gun Kata, but it's not worth the rest of the crap intro. It's so generic and cheap to begin a movie so dependent on style.

The movie posters and DVD box both have the word Equilibrium in caps with a strange letter Q that is perfectly symmetric, and makes the whole word look like it's balancing on that Q tail. So I wrote a bunch of human-y, emotion-y words on index cards with ink and charcoal and scanned them, stole some textures off the internet (free ones, not actually stolen), found some nice, futuristic geometric fonts and made a picture of a bottle of the drug Prozium in Photoshop.

Then I made a Photoshop document with about 50 layers which I turned on and off to make the different frames. I used the voice-over at the beginning as my guide to the frames, so words appear as they are referenced, and scroll across to make the big pile of emotionally charged bad things which are then balanced by the tiny bottle of Prozium, then the word becomes the balance point. It's all very deep and stuff, I'm sure, but mainly it just looked really cool, I thought. I had fun with the colours, too. The gold and the blue-grey are basically the only colours in the whole movie, so I used them at the end to transition to the opening scene, where a bunch of blue-grey hippies get shot in the face.

And everybody liked it. Go me.

I'm throwing them all at the end here so you can see all the frames...this is how they appeared on my final storyboard sheet, since no-one really wants to click on 16 different frames. I know I don't.