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Storyboard

This morning I read what I think is a great essay entitled Immigrant Song1 written by Alex Hillkurtz2. I'm mostly writing this as a reminder to read that essay every so often for inspiration.

It's a reflective look at painting as a process and it's Jack Handy deep.

I'm also writing it because the author is a professional storyboard'ist or whatever it may be called - likely a storyboard3 artist. When I first started into web publishing, it always reminded me of creating a storyboard. In college I had a class where my professor had us storyboarding up everything and anything. I remember doing one from a mythology book I had and another from a burger king television ad.

I remember at one point building out a plugin designed to create and publish storyboards but I never really polished it up and got it off the ground. It's such a skilled specialized form of communication. It's somewhat universal and it's at the heart of our multimedia communications. I'd imagine it closest to comic strip artist and somewhat invaluable to screenwriters4. It's basically what every Power Point, Google Slides, or whatever new fangled flipamadoozie app you're using56.

Every piece of art is a bit of a storyboard sans the format specifics. I recently noted7 a fella8 who goes to great lengths, like buying antiques, to stage his paintings. Here's a painting referencing classic comics9.

But back to the essay. The better half and I have been joking recently that folks are just cosplaying roles and it reminded me of what the author wrote:

We chose to paint ourselves into existence.

Don't we though? It's empowering when you really embrace it that way. I don't know if I've just had my head up my arse or if it just requires a certain amount of self awareness or experience, but the feeling of writing the chapters however I'd like is coming more into focus. Perhaps I should storyboard it out for fun.

"One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things" – Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch10 - Henry Miller, 1956.



Footnotes​

  1. immigrant song - https://alexhillkurtzart.substack.com/p/immigrant-song ↩

  2. Alex Hillkurtz - https://www.alexhillkurtzart.com/about ↩

  3. storyboard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard ↩

  4. Final Draft - https://www.finaldraft.com ↩

  5. Storyboard Hero - https://storyboardhero.ai ↩

  6. Boords - https://boords.com ↩

  7. /notes/art/painters ↩

  8. William Rochfort - https://www.williamrochfort.com ↩

  9. The Soda Shop - https://www.williamrochfort.com/previous-work/the-soda-shop ↩

  10. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sur_and_the_Oranges_of_Hieronymus_Bosch ↩