Studio 2: WIP Week 5

By Holland Kerr

WEEK 5 

Context: 

Being a folio week, I haven’t devoted as much time to research as I have to compiling, but between drawings and colour stories, I’ve been watching “Waltz with Bashir.”

When I first began this project with Sean in early 2020, Waltz with Bashir and Spirited away were his reference points for an ideal style, and as someone with a naturalistic drawing style, I’ve leaned closer to this work over time. Now that I am at the second, more adult part of this project, Waltz and my work have a lot of stylistic elements in common. I also watched “Stand By Me” as a reference point for storyboarding with a retrospective singular male narrator in mind. Though any excuse to watch Stand By Me is a good enough one. 

Some notes I took from Waltz with Bashir include: 

-it’s recurring focus on children as a narrative time revealing tool, as a metonym for peace-time, and as a metaphor for evading guilt and grief. For a film about war, there is the image of children hovering over the whole film, keeping their future always on the periphery. 

-it’s designs are live action like in scale and perspective and focus but where it transitions into surreality is it’s use of colour. Locations tend to be monochromatic, and have personalities of their own. It almost reminds me of “Intolerance” or any of those pre-colour film hand coloured movies. 

-locations and scenes are interconnected, isolated from each other visually. The events of a conversation or an action or a memory nearly never play out over more than one location, they are each very intentionally self contained. A singular feeling, a singular colour scheme and a singular location are components of each memory/scene. 

As much as I’m drifting from focusing my inquiry on parental relationships and towards the societal relationship between prisoners and the outside world (thanks to inspiration from Deana Lawson in week 4), the idea of totally shifting colour stories depending on the location / mood really appeals to me, especially as I want to draw a distinction between the real, comforting, familiar lived space of the home and the detached and uncaring space of the hospital. 

 

Rationale/Motivation: 

This week was focused on creating colour compositions, making final adjustments to my storyboards, finalising my prop and character designs and generally compiling my works and thoughts towards folio 1. 

What is becoming apparent is my want to separate the home space from the hospital space in this work. I want the hospital to feel detached, cruel, systemic and disinterested toward the family as a metonym for the way in which society treats a felon/former felon. In earlier versions of the storyboards, I really wanted to somehow work in imagery of the Mohawk correctional facility, to bring the prisoner dehumanisation storyline to the surface, but it felt clunky with my audio, and instead I want to turn the hospital into a prison like environment, I’m some ways. This is why I’ve worked in doctors and nurses bustling around Willis without acknowledging him. To be specific, I don’t want imprisoned people to be represented as hated or hurt, I want to draw attention to them being overlooked and ignored. 

This influenced the separation between my colour patterns chosen for the home spaces and the hospital spaces, as well as the desaturated baby mint and Manila colouring of the hospital (in my current design). I also want the yellow/orange rich skin colours of Willis’s sister and mother to alter this space when reflected in the muted silver hospital equipment. 

Methods: 

I have been using procreate to work mostly this week, though making my animatic in Adobe Animate. I made rough mock-ups of my different shots and then coloured them based on three designs, submitted those designs to Sean, made three out of the one he liked, and then had him choose from them etc etc. 

Impact: 

I’m debating whether it is I want to create proximity between an incarcerated an those on the outside, as described in the PRP from week 4, or whether I want to draw attention to Willis’s reconnection to his family, but these goals overlap in a lot of ways.