Animatic

The Melancholic Wife Storyboards – Sixth Sequence

| garygowran

The Melancholic Wife re-emerges back into the real world, the ‘unromantic walls of her real life’. She moves through the room, giving us an opportunity to see the world she inhabits, the objects that make up her life. She turns on a lamp, she has gained illumination and she reaches for her journal to record it, ‘trying to hold on to the nuances of her transmutations’.

Sound Design – Music Soundtrack

| garygowran
Just as with voice over it feels imperative to be conscious of the power of music to shape the mood and reaction of an audience to the film. In practical terms, this being a student film and therefore on a limited budget, the opportunity to freely select music is limited by economics as well. We feel fortunate in some regards because we found that the tone and flow of the visuals married well with the Classical Music genre. But it feels important to note that this wouldn’t have been our first choice as in our minds the protagonist does inhabit a modern world with a modern taste in music, so compromise is necessary. The classical music genre has a longer history than most musical genres so there are more compositions that are license free with some performances coming under creative commons.


I used the website Musopen to explore options for the soundtrack. Musopen is a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on increasing access to music by creating free resources and educational materials. They provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.

For the first drafts of the animatic, myself and Sadhbh chose Reverie by Debussy for the first act of the film before the Melancholic Wife chooses her own music. We felt this gave a good sense of the initial journey she embarks on. For the change moment we chose Wagner music, for the sense of drama and a journey, specifically from the opera Tannhauser. These two pieces acted as a starting point a placeholder to help visualise the film.

When it came time to consciously examine and choose the music, myself and Sadhbh decided to attempt to find female composers to try and rebalance the gender representation given the narrator is a male voice. Using Musopen again we discovered two compositions; for the main body of the film we selected a piece called Three Dramatic Etudes by Pandora Selfridge; for the change of tone we have picked a section from 4 Sketches, Op.15 by Amy Marcy Beach. We feel that the first composition is working well but that the second one may need further exploration as it may not represent enough of a positive tone shift.

Melancholic Wife Animatic Version 11

| garygowran
With this animatic I’ve added an opening and closing sequence to the film. The opening uses the cover illustration from the first zine collection of the short stories. The font is from the cover and website as well. The ending sequence uses pages and panels from the comic to give a sense of the wider world in which the Melancholic Wife exists.

Sound Design – Voice Over

| garygowran
My short film employs a voice over narration to work with the visual storytelling. This narration is an adaptation of the text narration of the original comic. In collaborating with Sadhbh we have tried to be conscious of the power of having a voice describing the story of our protagonist. There is a distance that necessarily exists because she is not speaking directly to the audience of her experience. We further wanted to explore this distance by having a male voice speak the story. Our reasoning behind this is a desire to investigate and play with the conventional dominance of men telling women’s stories. In societal terms the male voice can seem to lend an unconscious authority and we want to use this bias to support the telling of an unconventional story exploring the inner complexity of a woman’s experience.

From the research into my extended essay on the Essay Film genre I have learned of the opinion that voice over can communicate as authoritarian in film. Dictating to the audience what they should think and how they should feel about the accompanying visuals. I also want to be conscious of this by pursuing a storytelling tone to the narration. There will hopefully be a neutrality to it, a separateness which leaves room for the visuals to occupy its own space and leaves a space in-between for the subjective reaction of an audience to reside in.

Mid-way point Animatic

| garygowran
With this new update I have; 
  • Changed the narration scratch audio to try and suit the tone of the present visuals more accurately. This audio though feels slower and will need to be updated again. It might be time to approach a professional at this point to begin to lock down the timings.
  • Taken away the textured background in the first sequence to make space for another layer of rising floorboards that hopefully then creates a sense of the Melancholic Wife being swallowed by the darkness as the two layers of floorboards open up and she falls between them.
  • Scratch sound effects have been added.
  • Minor changes and additions to scenes for clarity of storytelling and timing, for example a truck in has been added to the final scene to highlight the notebook and pen on the table.

Updated Animatic

| garygowran

For this updated version of my animatic I have addressed some of the issues that I didn’t feel were working from the first draft.

  • I added a textured background wall to the first sequence to explore what it might add to the piece, I think it helps to give some context to the action.
  • For the sanding and painting sequence I had, before producing the first storyboards, imagined it as an overhead shot but I struggled to visualise this at first, wrestling with the idea of making it as readable as possible. With feedback from Ed, I returned to my original idea for this animatic and am pleased with the results.
  • From the first animatic it became apparent that for the film adaptation I would need to signify the learning that the Melancholic Wife takes on that enables her to overcome and access her power in the last sequence. In consultation with Sadhbh, we decided that we would explore the concept of her taking one of the ghosts with her, accepting this avatar of her teenage self into her arms as she’s swallowed by the blackness.
  • The final scene has also been changed for this version. Now the Melancholic Wife emerges from the dream space through a door created from the light of her self expression. She re-enters the ‘unromantic walls of her real life’, a space signified by objects and ephemera from the comic stories, ‘striving to hold on to the nuances of her transmutations’ by taking up a pen and journal.

First Animatic

| garygowran
This is my first animatic representing what the story could look like adapted for film. The first challenge that arises isthe timing for each scene within the film, how to tell the story in an effective but also efficient manner in order to make it realistically achievable in the timeframe I have to make it. I am happy with some of the transitions, the black to carpet to wooden floorboard from the first sequence to the next feels right, but the transition from the Wife being swallowed by the dark claws to the final sequence needs more work. I think that I was attempting to retain too much of the original comic’s aesthetic in this transition and neglecting the requirements and benefits of film.