The Minimum Viable Movie
First, we assume naivete about how films should work.
My relationship with movies mirrors my relationship with everything else - books, music, and perhaps, games. I crave excitement when I consume any of these things. Excitement first, not knowledge. I have specific moments in life when I’m dedicated to learning, and the ponderousness of the source material would not deter me, but when I’m out of my learning cocoon, I have only one requirement from whatever I consume: pulsating excitement. Titillate me, my dear!
All this to say that when I listen to music, play a game or watch a movie, I am looking to be lost in a world that engages my eyes 100% and my brain a maximum of 1%. I find, also, that I’m able to excuse anything from a creator if I buy into their philosophical worldview. You can spin many a bullshit yarn - with my admiring acquiescence - if I subscribe to your worldview ab initio.
The way I think about storytelling is aptly represented by the story of Princess Scheherazade, a woman who stormed the palace of the king(?) armed with nothing but cliffhangers. She was to be killed the selfsame night she showed up to the palace, but the king could just not bear to not know how her stories ended, so he kept putting off her execution until he presumably fell in love with her (okay - you got me, I didn’t really read Arabian Nights! But that’s not important, I swear).
The point of this, I guess, is to say that I am a potboiler/raconteur not for altruistic means but because it’s one of the few times in life I’ve been able to arrest a room. On most days, I’m mostly invisible, but give me the power of a good story and now I have your attention. As a result, I’ve told story after story, spun yarn after yarn, and moved from merely writing to drawing to animating - anything to deliver the story in its God-ordained format.
I consider this article the logical end to my tripartite series on Do While Thinking, and I wanted to make sure I ended it before 2019. If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been navigating real life with a camera, reframing the human experience cinematically, drawing (mostly weak, but you indulge me still) parallels between the big screen and life. Good Place, Bad Place, Medium Place? Yes. Embedded Universe Theory? Of course. A Juju Manifesto. Indeed.
Consider this the epilogue.
I’ve also spoken sparingly about Obaranda. Obaranda was the same as every baby: embryonic at first, brimming with potential, but the older it gets, the more it - via negativa - obliterates that promise. And that’s what it is - a promise. An IOU, from me to everyone who knows me, of storytelling. A cheque you’ve never been able to quite cash because I’ve been sweating the small stuff, instead of getting out of my way and just creating.
To its credit, Obaranda allowed me to think about the future, to think about Mainland, to think about the possibilities of - perhaps in the future? - creative assets and a distribution engine that amplifies the value of everything it creates. My LinkedIn bio used to read ‘Mogwai on his way to build the future of African blockbuster content.’ Delusional? Absolutely. I don’t even have anything worth that conviction. But hey.
But - and that’s the crucial point of this meandering piece - perhaps I shouldn’t think too grand. Thinking too grand without having the present-day tools to manifest expected outcomes is a recipe for dejection and despair. Perhaps I should think small. So small. As small as the minimum viable product.
The Minimum Viable Movie
I have been thinking about how the storyboard is the minimum viable movie. It is the smallest, most affordable version of a movie that holds all context about the storytelling in a visually coherent flow. It is often said that Alfred Hitchcock perfected storyboards so well that when it was time to shoot, he didn’t even have to look into his viewfinder.
Add speech bubbles to a storyboard and you have a comic book. Add transitions to a storyboard and you have an animatic.
I like this sweet spot because it’s one I currently know how to traverse: storyboard, comic book, animatic and back again, and I have discovered new-found appreciation for the medium(s). They are cheap (the only cost is your time, your creativity and how much you invest in your personal self-development), form the building blocks for going on to create more remarkable, fully-developed projects in the future.
I’ve always admired the fact that Rick and Morty was based on a non-professional workflow long before it was developed for TV. It’s even more obvious in the work of Olan Rogers, with Final Space. It used to be a show called Gary Space, which was essentially an animatic.
My point, I suppose, is that I am going to get out of my way in 2020 - and onwards - and create the minimum viable version of everything I think of, hoping resources catch up to me as I go along.
How about that for a TL;DR?
Merry Christmas!