Adapting Text

Exercise 4

I decided to type the three pages out in Illustrator, where I then went on to cutting up the text and adding colour codes.

The three pages felt to have a good amount of descriptive information that would help visualise the frames, and dialogue between characters. When dividing them into colours I used green for Descriptive that would help me set the scenes, blue for thoughts/ inner dialogue, pink for dialogue, and orange for sound. What remained in black was information that didn't really serve me too greatly though it may have added to the descriptive information.

I imagined this as a manga, very expressive with emotions and the vegetation being really beautiful. In fact when breaking this down into the colours, and taking in the visual information, I really felt the sweet positive storyline of a Studio Ghibli. I can see the green simply directing the scenes, where the pink dialogue would lead the narration.

The next step I took was breaking this down into the frames, or storyboarding it.

When it came to planning the frames, I decided to add another colour to experiment with "flash backs" within the story. Particularly where the lead character is thinking about life in Tokyo, how life is around her yet goes unnoticed. I saw it as a character building opportunity, a look into the life keyhole. But also it was a time of reflection as the character was experiencing closeness to nature with senses being extra sensitive, and realising the lack of life in her everyday. This experimenting with flashbacks would also crossover with inner dialogue.

To take the planning stage further, I decided to create a mood-board with reference images I thought would be useful in visualising the story. I had an idea of the style and feel I would use for this story, and perhaps felt familiar with certain expressions that would suit dialogues based on things I had already seen.