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Visualize Story Boards

Alice's picture

Following my thought on hegemony of time over space and Tufte's notion of mapping pictures and synthesis of all modes of data, I began to think about how these ideas could relate to the presentation of visual arts, especially movies. Then I came up with the example of a story board. The story of a movie first comes from a script, which is predominantly, or entirely, of words. Then, because movies are essentially visual, storyboard artists turn the written words into a series of frames of drawings, which supposedly correspond to the actual shots. Hence, storyboards are predominantly images. These two parts, script and storyboard, are both constitutive of the final product, the movie itself, and yet they exist as separate sets of data without complementing on each other. Moreover, even though the storyboard consists of images, it is nonetheless arranged in a temporal order, instead of a more productive model of temporal-spatial integration. As Manovich points out, even though human beings cannot imagine beyond the 4D spaces we live in, data often represent more than four dimensions, my idea is (since I don't know how to construct a model that's more than four dimensions) to re-present the mode of a storyboard in a more "structural" or multi-dimensional model than the current flatland, word-image segregation model.

Basically, I place the characters and their plot according to their physical positions to one another, so this is already 3D space. Then the dimension of time intersects with the space, and at every intersection, the reader/audience will be able to know exactly who is doing what at this specific point of time. The reader can also either locate a specific physical place to trace the progression of event over time, or identify multiple happenings at a synchronous time-plane. I will also include differentiated arrows to indicate their distinct functions. In this way, not only can multi-dimensional nature of reality be represented in multi-dimensional ways as closely as possible, but also can words and images be constructed as synthesized data system.

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Comments

Alice's picture

technically challenged....

i've been playing around with blender to figure out if i could 3-d my story board model. after reading much of the software's instruction, i still don't know how to make anything happen on blender.... it's frustrating....

sunah's picture

If you're serious about

If you're serious about trying to create this, the guys in ACM Siggraph here at UofI have extensive expertise and tutorials on Maya: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/siggraph/members.php#tutorials -- they also hold live tutorials every once in a while. Might be worth checking out or dropping them a line =)

Otherwise, I have some experience with 3D Studio Max so I might be able to help you out a little.