an immersive experimental drama installation made as a research project
Storyboard – Leonie Sharrock
This is the wonderful storyboard that Leonie Sharrock created for us before we shot Echo and Narcissus. Humphry Trevelyan (cinematographer) and I used it during the shooting, in order to remind ourselves what we were supposed to do. What’s great about it is not just the style – look at the way the Gods are portrayed as tragedy masks for example – something we couldn’t capture in the final film, but also the accurate emotion conveyed in faces and in geography.
However, we shot in quite a hurried way for 8 days, at about 6 – 8 hours per day, and we didn’t slavishly obey the storyboard. Rather, Humphry took advantage of the location to get the best shots, and I tried to allow the actors freedom to move in a way they thought comfortable.
What the storyboard enabled us to do was to envisage the five screens all the time. There were problems in continuity – actors entering and leaving frame,and timings between screens, but this could only have been solved by shooting an animatic (cartoon version of film) in advance. I didn’t want to do this, partly because we didn’t have enough resources, but also because I would have got bored and been unable to keep the momentum of the production going.