Journey for Bernie: Behind the scenes (part 2)

Once the tune was written and I knew the timing wasn’t going to change, it was safe to start the storyboarding process. While I was working on the tune, I would listen to it over and over again in the car on my way to and from my job as an art teacher. I’d make mental notes on what needed fixing in the song itself, but I was also starting to visualize what it would look like.

Necessity had driven the idea of puppets that only show from the waist up and flat backgrounds and set pieces, but I now had to figure out what those puppets and backgrounds would be and do. I feel very strongly that the drastic change Mr. Sanders calls for is a dire necessity, but I also wanted to keep the tone light so I could communicate urgency without being panicky. I set to work on a first pass of square-ratio storyboards (they’re just post-it notes), which you can see here:

The first round of storyboards.

This didn’t all show up at once. Even just this little smattering of ideas is the result of hours of listening through the song, stopping and starting it, and going over specific sections until I thought of something that worked. A lot of the ideas, like the transition of the toxic water going into the boy’s glass, made it to the final product. Some, like the elephant in a gestapo uniform, I decided were too heavy-handed for the vibe I wanted. It was a very difficult line to walk. My favorite shot will probably always be the main puppet (it’s just myself) coming into frame just to drop “seriously,” second from the right on the second to last row.

The worst idea to come out of this process was the text scroll. I was trying to speed up the process so I could make my self-imposed deadline of February 3rd (the Iowa caucus), but this was too much of a corner to cut. When I started converting these sketches into rough storyboards, I got to this section and it felt just awful. The screen was going to be absolutely dead; I did not feel great about myself as an artist that day.

But like every time that happens, I put the project down for a day and came back to it with fresh eyes. The static words, even if I made them dance around or something, were absolute crap. That was objective. But that feeling pushed me to create the coolest sequence of the short, which I unofficially called ‘the four dystopias.’ I wanted to reiterate the point during the bridge (the whistling part) that basically all of our problems as a nation are caused by a greedy few through the power of the businesses they own. Climate change is caused by oil and gas companies who refuse to acknowledge their responsibilities, our health care system has been absolutely devastated by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies, our rights to privacy and to internet are being meticulously dismantled by big tech and telecom companies, and the so-called “affordable housing crisis” is obviously caused by—you guessed it—big real estate. It probably set the whole process back a couple days, but it was worth the planning that went into it. You can see the rough storyboard here:

Obviously, a lot changed. Imagery drawn while angry was removed (it’s never my best work), lyrics were rewritten here and there, I removed a reference to a congressional candidate here in Oregon, and a few other minor edits were made. And again, this animatic (drawn in ToonBoom Storyboard Pro with a Huion drawing tablet), crude as it is, is weeks of work, sucking up all but maybe one or two nights and weekends. But once the planning was finally, FINALLY done, the fun of making all of it could begin! Next time I’ll talk about the fabrication process for the first part of the film.