Aesthetic Overview
Mood boards and Storyboarding
Mood Boards
The starting point for a visual design typically starts with a mood board that helps define style, feeling and general aesthetics of a part or whole of a creative project.
Mood boards may include a collection of words, colors, graphics, textures, image references, screen grabs, sketches or other materials that contain some relevant details.
Creating mood boards can be a collaborative process and they are often used to communicate ideas that are difficult to describe with words.
Making Mood Boards
There is no set process for creating a mood board and it is usually an informal process. Start with using whatever tools you feel most comfortable with, then compile into a PDF or other collection for sharing with collaborators. For some people tools like Pinterest / GoMoodBoard are useful, whereas others will simple keep a folder full of files on their hard drive.
It is okay to use stock footage, shot clips from films, images from the net; you are not going to use these materials, nor copy them, for the final product, but you can use them for inspiration, to describe particular styles and to better understand existing visual languages.
Mood Boards
Along with film and video, mood boards are widely used by graphic designers, interior designers, industrial designers, photographers and other creative artists. In the professional world it is common to prepare mood boards for clients during the early stages of a production to visually illustrate various stylistic ideas that will be further developed.
This process is also an opportunity to consider the relationships and conceptual mappings between these elements, such as visual imagery, music and performers. Using the materials gathered for a mood board artists can create simple derivative image collages and sketches that can be used to further explore different possible juxtapositions.
Bang On A Can early concept via Candystations
Storyboards
After the theme, setting, and mood for a performance or a production are organized in mood boards the next step is often to plan out or “storyboard” a script for choreographing various forms to music, actors, along with other elements temporally.
We use storyboards to takes the ideas derived from the mood board and places them in time, typically matching up events such as style changes with important moments in other elements of the show production, such as the music or theater scene changes.
A storyboard for The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd episode #408
Storyboards: Animation, Film and Show Production
In the animation industry, storyboards are comprised of “extremes and in-betweens.” Extremes are moments that set the exact mood, emotion, or key image in a sequence. In-betweens are the transitional frames that move from one extreme to the next.
In the world of film production a storyboard is also commonly known as a shooting board. Here we essentially have a series of frames, with drawings of the sequence of events in a film, like a comic book or photo novella version of the film. Preparing these documents can help film directors, cinematographers and clients visualize the scenes and how they connect together.
For a show production the process from both animation and film storyboards can be applied; you may have storyboards that show the broad changes in themes between and over the course of individual songs or act, and you may have storyboards that focus on the details of specific changes within a verse of a song or scene from a play.
Storyboards
Storyboards are commonly made with images, sometimes also including short text elements, like laying out sequences for a “comic book” or photo novella.
Storyboard example from the “How to Turn an Old Building into an Interactive Driving Range by Gabe Shaughnessy & Dan Cohen” case study.
Storyboards are often made from templates
Storyboards: Animation
Storyboard frames
Animated result
Demonstrations