Wacky Wendigo

What is a “Wendigo”? A wendigo is a cannibalistic giant transformed from human to monster. And our story starts from here: a wendigo sneaks to a snow resort and attacks the residences.
Our group “Wacky Wendigo” explores the pre-production procedure of filmmaking through storyboard and character design, in order to develop visions to be presented in the film. With the belief that pre-production is one essential part in filmmaking that in large degree determines the style of the movie; we want to take this chance to amplify this important process and experiment the possibilities of composition and visual design.
The idea is originated from the feature length screenplay Morgen is currently working on. As the author, Morgen choose a scene from her screenplay that she wants to realize, and we sit together to talk about things that first strike us in the scene. Fill to the genre of horror, the story of Wendigo mainly depicts the danger people face. Each of us toss every possible idea on the table and discuss about it; how it illuminates danger and alienation and which would better capture the fear we want to create. Alexis draws some scratches while we talk about images that pop out our mind. To create a more vivid world, Eileen and I search online to find anything that we think would help and watch TV shows like Buffy for inspirations. We discuss about the look of the monster and how it attacks people as Alexis realize it down to the paper. At the end of the discussion, we compile the drawing, images we find, and text from Morgen’s script together to best present the dark, snowy, isolated and dangerous world that exists on our mind to the spectators.
I’ve drawn storyboard before for my films. But storyboarding for this project was more challenging than doing it alone because it was such a collaborative work that required input from each of us. In this project we respected Morgen’s idea as her original creation, and we tried to help come up with more creative shots when the shots we already had might not seem to be effective enough. I was surprised to find that how working with others broadened the project and affected so many changes. A lot of the ideas they contributed were something I had never thought of. Also, there was no finalized image for us. We could always look back on the shots we drew and changed some of the elements to make them better.
It was really interesting to gather together with artists from different concentration and make one piece of project that each of us contributed to. Artists should never exist only in their own art filed. Art needs collaboration to achieve improvement and realization.