Tricks of the Trade - Synopses and Moodboards

Today was another splendid day where we not only received helpful feedback on the short films we shot last week, but also chose our individual pathways, talked about improvement of our blogs and professional internet presence in general and last but not least delved into the process of idea generation and communication.

Based loosely on the mantra of a much admired lecturer back in Germany who repeatedly coined the phrase "as much as necessary, as little as possible" I will henceforth try to break down the results of my learning and individual research in a condensed, less wordy fashion. I hope that it does not turn out too sterile for those who want to follow my process at CCAD. But since blogging (and vlogging) will be a major part of my learning experience, I might as well make it efficient for all the parties involved.

This includes not dwelling on the tips I received for building my page in a more professional manner; you will be able to see the design changes and improvements in the days and months to come. After finally deciding on our pathways (it turned out to be the Filmmaking Pathway for all of us, hooray!) we collectively set out to learn about synopses and mood boards in effectively communicating our story ideas.

While a synopsis for a film idea should entail all the necessary information on:

- plot,

- character and character development,

- core conflict or inciting incident,

- reveal and

- resolve of said conflict,

it is apparent that you want to present as condensed but complete a story as possible. This, to my mind, also entails knowing the structure of your story idea. And while you should always tend to write your synopsis in third person, we were given a maximum of 1 DIN A4 page for a story of ten minutes length.

And while the synopsis tells you a lot about WHAT the story is all about, the corresponding mood boards naturally tell you a lot about the HOW. So mood boards are basically collages of imagery that tell the look and the mood of your film idea.

And while you can easily and randomly compile images into a mood board, I thought about splitting mine into different elements, namely not only

- the overall plot,

but also:

- for each character,

- the conflict,

- the resolve and reveal,

- for every scene (if possible)

- and its emotional value.

Since I am a huge fan of highly stylised films and scenes, I believed that the more differentiated approach on mood boards, albeit a huge workload, could better serve to define what I want to achieve at every step along the way.

It turned out to be plain counterproductive for me. It has again been one of those huge ambitions I tend to impose on myself, in the hope that the toil will be worth it in the end.

But I soon realised that this was not serving me any better for it made everything unnecessarily complex and moreover confusing. Being able to condense your story within only one coherent moodboard forces you to concentrate on the most important aspects and sort out all that is secondary to it. I realised that it is actually a virtue, so I ditched it directly at the first attempt of my Me, Myself, and I-project.

However, I realised that I could incorporate the elements named above by the mere arrangement of the images within the moodboard. This would allow people to immediately get an inkling about the plot, the characters, character relations and - hey - the mood.

So I will rather attempt the minimalist approach and see how far it is able to carry me.I already came up with a couple of ideas for the short films we are about to script so it's now going to be an interesting time and matter of steady refinement and improvement.