Why tornado

So at this point I had developed a few key things for my story that led me to get out a first version of storyboards.


But let me backtrack - these boards require some explaining.


My main focus last spring, when I was first conceiving the roots of my film, was a poem.  This poem was charged with everything I could think of regarding my subject matter of  and how it related to me (I'll post this poem up at a later date).

It was what my idea revolved around at the time.
Later in the summer, I found myself taking Ruben's, Natural Phenomena: Special Effects, course (which I recommend for animators of any medium).  By the end of it I found my next main asset, the asset which trumped over the poem and is now the main aspect of it: The Tornado.

Here's a little story about how it came about:
At the beginning of the class Ruben wanted us to give him written proposals on what special effect we wanted to work on and how we will be treating it.  Being that, by nature, working with special effects can take a large amount of time he wanted us to narrow in on what we will be experimenting on as soon as possible.  He gave us a range of examples, from cloth simulations to steam.  Before concluding his list of possibilities, he said something along the lines of, "if you want to be really crazy just go make a tornado.  It's just so freaking hard.  Don't even explain any details, all you literally need to do is get a piece of paper and right in the middle of it just write the word 'tornado'." So I did that.  I am always seeking out challenges.

That may have come about kind of aimlessly, but more and more I realized there was so much behind the symbolism of what it represents and how it can be decoded to refer to Depression.  I will get into the symbolism in a later post, but essentially this is what brought about the next key aspect in my film, the farmer and his home.  More and more, I developed it, and soon many aspects of what I had in my eyes, reflected what the poem was trying to say and more.




So in a little note to myself before the semester started, while I was still in the midst of dozens of ideas, wrote down what I had confirmed thus far and will definitely be striving to show come the final render of this film:
- 3D Renders of tornado
- 2D Renders of tornado
- Character being chased by tornado
- Character overcoming tornado
- Poem ideas
- Shot ideas

Then on September 22, I laid down what else I had confirmed before boarding:
- Farmer Character
- Farm House
- Getting sucked into tornado
- Shot of house being torn off it's foundation, watching from a distance
- Conceptual ideas