You Are the One - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 10

guide to produce it. But what is the underlying theory? What form of abstraction is
involved here?
The theory espoused by the storyboard is very much to do with assumptions
that can be made about the way people watch and make sense of fi lms. “ Timmy ' s
Lessons in Nature” is a comic animation, meaning that it belongs to the cartoon
genre of fi lms, and thus has certain conventions to do with theme, story, lighting,
and so on. One of the many, well known conventions of the genre is that not only
are strange, unusual things likely to happen but that reversals of fortune occur very
frequently for all the characters involved. The storyboard conveys this very well but
it also relies on the idea that, knowing the rules of fi lm and of the cartoon genre in
particular, we can actually take a single, hand drawn image and produce the whole
clip in our minds.
Each picture in the storyboard stands in for a complete fi lm clip and we use our
imaginations and knowledge of the language of fi lm to make it real in our minds.
The storyboard thus emphasizes the sequence of dramatic events that happen to the
three characters in question. In other words, the way dramatic tension is controlled
through the editing together of fi lm clips is taken as the most important detail to be
abstracted. If the storyboard is well constructed we can imagine a highly complex
sequence of fi lmic/cartoon events with a great degree of precision.
Not all storyboards work in exactly this way, of course. There are other features
of fi lms we can abstract out of fi lms: action sequences or long tracking or panning
shots, for example. Storyboards will often also be annotated to bring in additional
information to do with dialogue, lighting, musical score and sound effects, and so
on. There are a lot of details relevant to a fi lm which cannot easily be represented
in static images.
Notice in the example above how many times an arrow is added to the image
representing each clip. Cartoons and fi lm in general are about action. In rows one
and two, the arrows represent direction of a character. In row three, the arrows
represent the “camera” panning upwards to the branch the snake is trying to hold
on to. By using the nonfi lmic device of an arrow to indicate directions of movement,
the idea of one image for each clip/sequence of fi lm can be preserved. We don't
have to be told that the arrow won't appear in the fi nished cartoon. We know how
to read the storyboard and “view” it in our minds eye as a cartoon sequence.
To summarize, we can observe that even something as apparently simple as the
humble storyboard is based on the twin notions of theory and model. The modeling
aspect of storyboarding allows us to visualize a complex entity such as a cartoon or
feature fi lm in terms of a few salient features. Underlying the model is the theory
that from simple static images, people can imagine complex sequences of fi lm
because they are familiar with the language of fi lm, the way fi lms are photographed
and lit, the way they are edited, and so on.
Interestingly, one of the reasons why this particular storyboard works so well
is that it is easily recognizable as belonging to the cartoon genre, which in turn means
that we are able to employ more specifi c knowledge of this particular type of content
in our imaginings. In the next chapter we will make a study of genre theory and