2018 | Production Diary 1 | Film: Cycle

Film Production Diary: Storyboarding to Prodcution

I haven't updated this blog since Cabbage Pot and the film review of Blade Runner 2049, so I felt a bit ashamed I hadn't continued to update this as planned, but things are starting back up and I felt I wanted to share what was coming.

The start of last month I was brought onto a film project by a good friend of mine, Ramin Iranfar, a filmmaker to look out for in the future; it's a small, no-budget, student project that's experimental in nature and Ramin is producing it. Our director is Başak Demirbaş, completing her Master's Degree at Deakin University who gave us this opportunity to produce what is essentially, an experimental film. Her idea was bold and was open for interpretation in the broadest sense - that there are more readings than one that could be taken. A young woman discovers a dream-like space that she is trapped within, she finds others who inhabit this ether who have their own invisible 'rooms'.

The project was a chance for all of us as students to sink our teeth into something creative and hopefully, prosperous as we're all involved in the arts and all hope to go onto bigger things. The craft of filmmaking is an immense one, even with the wide array of things we needed (and still need) to consider when producing this film, it quickly becomes apparent at how our project pales in comparison to the sheer complexity and nightmare of what a big-budgeted studio film would have to accomplish within the space of a few years or more. We began to understand quite quickly what we were all getting into and it has certainly given my respect to the multitude of filmmakers that have come before and are operating at this very moment.

My role was as a humble storyboard artist, a strange limbo-like position of taking the director's vision and putting that into frames, visualizing what it might eventually look like on film. I say limbo-like because it's very much a halfway point between one's own creative vision and the director's. The look and feel of the shots had already been in their mind, I was merely a transcriber of those images.

Ramin and I sat down with our director and we planned out each shot and what it should look like - I then took those little sketches which looked like some strange forgotten language and made full-paged storyboards, the likes of which are standard in film and animation.

Excerpt from my notebook scribbles - old woman dancing

Excerpt from my notebook scribbles - old woman makes faces

After these were completed we all went in for another meeting, this time with Nikki, our Director of Photography - another of Ramin's recruits. In this meeting it was crucial that we worked out all the shots we would need to film and see what exactly could be shot - a consideration in where the boundaries between our imaginations ended and the physical limitations of the camera were drawn; a drawing can only show so much. In the meeting we enacted what we were all imagining in the hopes we could explain to Nikki how the shots should be done, composition, speed, motion etc. We worked out we could combine, cut, where we could insert shots that weren't needed or hadn't been made, and this process lead to the structure of the ending changing from what Başak and I had in mind.

Shooting began last week without me, my commitments to my uni assignments won out and the shoot wasn't demanding enough where I felt I could be of any real help. From what I've seen, it went well and Ramin managed to wrangle a photographer who took a number of photos that will fit perfectly into the promotional materials that will inevitably be made.

This week I'm on set, as Art Director and Continuity, two roles that hardly apply to where we're shooting, the already beautiful Mt. Dandenong. The scenes we're shooting are in a dream-like forest (Page 3 of the storyboards) and there's quite a bit of room for experimenting beyond our boards, an area which hopefully I can help my director and the actor.

Next up will be a diary from after tomorrow's shoot if I have time to write it up!