Mood Board
On behalf of your group, your Production Designer will present a mood board to the class. At a bare minimum, the board should include:
3 fabric samples that suggest the mood of the script or its component scenes. This might be, but is not necessarily the same thing as choosing the fabric from which costumes will be made.
3 color swatches with RGB and hexcode values. Perhaps these are colors one associates with characters, or emotions, or time of day, or era of history.
3 physical items. These could be anything: toys, tools, gum wrappers – anything the script reminds you of or suggests. This phase of design is not about collecting actual props, but about being inspired in ways which will later guide you in that function.
The Production Designer will explain the relevance of these items to the class with a poise that indicates advanced preparation.
Word Lists
Each member of the crew will make a list of 25 words: five nouns for each of five senses – Smell, Taste, Hearing, Touch, and Seeing. These are to be nouns, not adjectives (“lemon” not “bitter”), that describe the feelings engendered by multiple readings of the script. The Director will collect and organize the words into a single list divided by sense. If your group has seven members, you will as a team generate 175 words.
Each member of the crew will generate a list of five action verbs for each dramatic beat/scene of the film (as decided by the director). If your film has 8 beats, your list will have 40 verbs. The verbs should be observable action (seem, be, appear are verbs but they are not action). It’s possible two characters are in a battle of wits or words. You might then describe their action with fighting verbs like “push,” “shove,” “defend,” or “resist.” The Director will collect and organize the words into a single list divided by scene. Submit one copy of the completed and combined word lists to D2L as a .pdf. Put a second copy in your crew’s project documentation folder on the anim-stor1 server.
Sound Design
On behalf of your crew, the Sound Editor should download and complete this form to submit a preliminary sound design for the film, exhaustively accounting for as many sounds as possible in each beat/scene of the film. As a starting place, sound effects often appear in ALL CAPS in a script. Dialogue may seem an obvious component, but use the form to make any notes about special dialogue recording challenges (whispers, screaming) which might arise in each scene. Consult the storyboard to pre-plan microphone placement (booms are difficult to hide in extreme long shots, for example). Submit one copy of the completed Sound Design form to D2L. Put a second copy in your crew’s project documentation folder on the anim-stor1 server.
The Sound Editor will present to the class (with a poise that indicates advanced preparation) a Spotify playlist of music selections for each dramatic beat/scene of the film. These are not final soundtrack selections. They’re not even “temp music” to guide the editor. They are, instead, indicators of emotion or character for a particular unit of action – a sonic version of the Production Design Mood Board above. Submit the playlist url to D2L.