Scribbling. Scribbling. Late into the night. Early in the morning. So much scribbling.
The Covid-19 pandemic is making life pretty tough. It’s easy to get down when the world is going crazy, and there’s nothing you can do about it. One thing I am extremely grateful for is that I can’t be bored. Technology has made it so that my wonderful team and I can talk to each other for hours and hours, three times a week. We’re making a film. We’re going full speed, and we don’t have to slow down. It’s a real blessing.
Since our first animatic, we’ve had a difficult time continuing to develop the story. We have a team of people full of great ideas for the story, and everyone has their own version of the story in their head. How do we distill it down into one thing? We thought that taking a step back and writing a script was the answer. We actually spent weeks trying to do it, and we basically got through one scene. We weren’t anywhere close to where we thought we’d be, and it was frustrating.
The fruit that came from the frustration was the realization that we can’t try to make all of our decisions before we really do anything. We have to just have to iterate as quickly as we can. So eventually we got back into storyboarding. It’s still frustrating, because none of us storyboarders are very fast at at it. There are a lot of ideas that we want to explore: namely, what the story would look like if we only had Aldo, and not Walter. If we had infinite amounts of time to explore these ideas, we would, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t.
So below is our second storyboard animatic. It’s progress, and we’re proud of it, but we also know there’s much more work to be done.