The Wacky Windigos is our group name and story telling is our game. We created a story board and a presentation that took the class through a process of pre-production of a movie. Organizing everything that goes into filming a script is taken for granted as an actor. The pre-production is where everything comes together before filming the actors. Because the actors only show up at this point, when the movie is being filmed, they may be unaware of all the steps it takes to put together the movie before they arrive.
All departments on a movie like script writers, lighting and costume designers, and the rest of the crew, must come together to understand the vision of the writer, producer and director, to make a cohesive movie.
The script has to be finished, the producers and their money have to be lined up, the green light from a studio must be achieved- meaning they sign a contract to make the movie. These are all issues before the filming begins. Our group focused on the in-between steps of selling our movie to the studios and the actual filming of it. We created a storyboard to set up a scene from a script "Wendigo" that Morgen had written.
We created this short story board from drawings and a power point using other movie's still images, also called screen shots, to compile the camera shots the writer may have envisioned for the movie. In a real story board meeting, like I have seen on the special features portion of Monsters Inc.,
DVD the animators would tell the complete story of the movie to the big wigs of the Disney / Pixar company to get a sense
of what the movie's plot might be or what the shots would potentially look like. They draw many boxes that show the action of the scene. (Monster's Inc. storyboard on the right illustrates the action of Boo and Sully.) Each box is a relevant picture of what the script is saying. Usually the writers point to each box as they tell the story to the big wigs and point to the box that goes along with their narrative to show what part of the story they are act and what the camera shots will look like. Some of the drawings are created so that the cinematographer and the camera men, know exactly how to angle the camera and what type of shot the
director wants. We, as a group, took the ideas of Morgen's script and talked about what she envisioned. We also talked about what we pictured when we read the script.
We came to realized, because of our backgrounds with different art forms, our visions of the script's shots were very different. I, as an actor always about thought what was at stake in the scene for the character which always had the shots in the movie with the actor as the main focus and in the center of the frame. Morgen thought of the shots as a directorial position, creating interesting shots by
placing the actor not in the middle of the short like I was seeing, but put the objects in the frame like you were seeing a photograph that was aesthetically pleasing to the viewer also sometimes the more beautiful shot. Take Sandra Bullock on the left, you can see that the way she is shot gives a more interesting frame than if just was just in the middle of the screen. With space in front of her in the frame makes the stairs longer which may create suspense to see what is waiting for her upstairs. Morgen, taking directing and script writing classes had a better idea of what would be more interesting on screen.
Alexis designed the costumes. As Morgen wrote the script Alexis created a costume for the Wendigo which included a lot of special fx makeup like you would see in any monster movie. This type of art includes many talented makeup artists and latex. To create it there would be a rubbery body for the monster as well as many latex face and mask pieces that will blend into the actor face after they have been painted with makeup to hide the rubber. Think of any monster on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or Eddie Murphy's "The Nutty Professor". Both medias used lots of fat suits, latex to distort and create a different face for the monster or professor. Here is a youtube that shows how the process works.
During the project Candy and I were coming from the actor's point of view which helped putting a face and image to Morgen's script. For the story-board-power-point we searched for images to help the audience have an emotional connection to the text as often actors do while they perform the text. In this project we assumed the position of the
communicators of the script through the pictures. Alexsis helped by drawing some of the events in the script that we could not find pictures for like a Wendigo clinging to the wall, stalking its prey.
As an actor we are the ones that bring the story to life, it's what the camera films. We bring the writer's vision to the big screen. This parallels my contribution to the project because Candy and I brought
the performances , through pictures of other actors. Because we could not perform on the slides we had the photos that struck a chord with us emotionally either thinking that is what the shot described to us, ro what we envisioned.
The project made us appreciate how much work goes into making a film and how a writer has to compromise their vision of the script as others create what is in the script to the best of their ability as they come together as a whole to create one piece of art.
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