The Spares

When I first started making the scenarios for my storyboards I fell victim to thinking I had more time than I did. I began with the utility pole scenarios and spent most time on them, it did help me get to grips with using photoshop to put these together but I wasn't decisive enough at the start and kept going over what I had already done.

This was the first, I tried to blow up a sketch I was fairly happy with from my sketchbook and use the photos I had taken to create a landscape in the same composition of the rough but lost interest half way through.

I then set to creating landscapes from photography but using only single photos to create the landscape and throwing in descriptors of what I imagined the space around to look like.

I played around with this idea and began retracting sections and removing whole areas, I got this idea from an album I listened to where the artist had changed production style, previously he would loop sounds and build one on top of another layering dozens of strings until he got tired of this style of production and so instead started removing whole sections of sound in order to suggest violence and destruction. I wanted something similar for this scenario and so thought to try it out for this slide

album = Public Speaking- Caress Redact

I wasn't a fan of the album but the method of creation I found fascinating. discovered through 'Perfect Sound, Whatever' mentioned in earlier blog post.

This was the first slide I began putting custom backdrops in, this is what I meant by thinking I had more time than I did. Each of these took quite a long time and not even all of them were used in the final storyboards (e.g below). They are all still quite nice though, I will show layer breakdowns of each of these later as I have planned each one for print too.

The bush here too, was ultimately not used in the utility pole storyboard, I was so happy with it though I ended up throwing it into the phone box instead, I felt the windswept look of the leaves really helped to suggest the idea of movement.

All of these were made before realising I wanted the U.P to follow a timeline that led to Philip K. Dick, Cyberpunk inspired efficacy.

This was where I realised I wanted it to follow a more William Gibson/Phillip K. Dick inspired style.

These last two show that I really struggled with creating such a feeling/aesthetic, I think not being surrounded by a built up city effected this, being in the outskirts of Glasgow, surrounded by rolling hills and lochs I didn't have much room for real life inspiration here, to the point that the last slide (below), really isn't anything just a collection of images almost none of which are mine.

After a long struggle though, I managed to get something I was happy with for the finalised storyboard and actually, the two last slides in the U.P storyboard are two of the ones I'm most pleased with.

 I mentioned Philip K. Dick as a huge influence on me earlier in the year, he tried with his work to describe a future setting, though in all of his work he described a human presence in the futures he postulated, now we wonder if there will even be one.

 Dick described future society's as mass consumerist populations controlled by advertising, mega conglomeration companies that owned all the wealth upholding social divides and influencing the population and the planets surface destroyed by war and radiation with animals dying out. With today's world having reached almost all of these criteria, what would he have written about now?

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Philip K. Dick

IF THIS IS THE ANSWER WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

265 MILLION

"Is it.. when the machines finally take over. How many humans will die in the first 24 hours, that the machines will later refer to as.. The Great Adjustment?" - a quote from Frankie Boyle in a popular segment from Mock the Week.

Films helped a lot with this storyboard. To name a few;

The Stalker- Andrei Tarkovsky

Blade Runner 2049- Denis Villeneuve

Fahrenheit 451- Francois Truffaut 

(See the finalised boards lower in blog)