Now I have all the necessary information for my project,
and along with it,
a visual archive that can help me in the creative process.
With these references,
I began to formulate ideas that would communicate the information,
ideas, and brand attributes.
Now I like to begin with written words instead of jumping straight to sketching.
These are the words that I came up with to describe the idea of storytelling.
Universal,
struggle, personal, mythic, historic, comedy, and drama.
Now I do this because over the years,
I found if I start sketching visuals right away,
I'm distracted.
I begin to focus more on the look and style of something rather than the core concepts.
This can come later,
so I'm going to go back to just the written word at this point.
Taking the idea of storytelling,
I wrote down a set of symbols that might refer to the subject.
What are the symbols for storytelling?
Could it be a campfire where people tell ghost stories,
books, an author at his typewriter,
a pencil and a notepad?
Feel free to just keep going.
Don't edit yourself.
Some ideas will be just plain stupid,
and some might be great.
I also thought about the idea of a journey,
since journeys are typically part of any story.
And along with that,
what are those symbols?
Road signs,
a sailing ship, shoes, and
maybe a library as a reference to storytelling.
What are the easy-to-understand symbols I can use to convey an idea?
And
I don't stay away from cliches.
I'm fine with them.
They tell the idea quickly.
Finally,
I landed on the concepts of myths and stories that are common to most of us,
and I made a long list of the different possible stories that we might all understand.
I
did a quick work session with people in my office to
determine which stories still resonated and which ones didn't.
It
wasn't a big analysis.
It was more about knowing the story and how it feels.
Fairly quickly, several stories came to the top.
Now,
I decided to stay away from the modern film and television options,
as they might be misunderstood as part of the actual festival.
So,
no Star Wars with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader,
or Battlestar Galactica.
Some
didn't make the cut,
like the myth of Prometheus or Don Quixote,
since fewer people knew them.
That's sad, whatever happened to literary education.
In addition to the sketches,
I drafted the narrative process as a diagram to better understand how the viewer responds to a story.
Who,
when, and how did a story evolve and change based on the style or where it was seen?
Once I'd explored all of the written concepts,
I moved on to sketching and creating a visual
representation of the ideas.
Now,
at this point, I can start considering layout and composition.
I
made a list of the top 10 myths that I liked,
and I started sketching.
Now,
don't worry about your sketches not being perfect.
Move fast.
My
sketches are so bad that I can't tell what they are later,
so I write down what each is to help me.
I needed to determine how could I tell the story of William Tell,
or David and Goliath,
in one image with symbols.
What
elements had to be included for the story to be understandable?
How
far could I simplify the image?
The
apple, arrow, and a hat were at the center of the William Tell myth.
All
the other elements of the story led to this one iconic moment.
The
pivotal moment when David slays Goliath identifies the story.
I
also needed here to include a big scale change between the two for it to be clear that this is what the story was about.
I
tried other ideas also.
Would prehistoric
cave art, our earliest stories, work when incorporating a film reel into the hunt?
In this instance, no.
It read as Attack of the Wheels.
One
element I knew I wanted was the sense of delight and discovery.
That meant not giving away the answer too fast,
making the viewer do some work to determine the message.
They remember it better that way.
Of
course, I could tell a story with a sequence of images,
like a film reel,
film strip, or comic book.
But
what was the most important element that identified that story?
Here,
zombies from The Night of the Living Dead.
For
the first presentation,
I kept all the ideas in rough sketch form.
I also used color sparingly, so
nobody would be distracted by it.
The
best ideas can be killed because someone didn't like the sketch color.
I want the client to imagine the
finished product at this point in their head.
A super tight comp might look great,
but the concept starts to become less important when people fixate on all the tiny details.
Fortunately,
all went well.
Robert
Radford loved the idea and we were ready to go.
The
concept was approved and now I could make it more real and I could focus on the color palette.