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Madeline lives and works in Los Angeles. When she’s not making movies, she’s script consulting, reading Agatha Christie books, writing fantasy stories, at the movies, or having in-depth discussions with her roommate’s cat.

PRESS

Adventures in storyboarding

by Aaron Fischer

“Can I ask you something about theater?”

“Sure,” I say.

“How do you handle perspective?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, in theater, it’s much harder to create a sense of subjectivity or point of view, because the point of view is always the audience. And that’s just one angle.”

I’m quiet for a moment. I don’t have an immediate answer.

And then I’m quiet for another moment. I don’t have a delayed answer either.

To help me stall, Madeline Hope Stephenson—film writer, director, and storyboard artist—elaborates on her question. She says that in this sense, the earliest films were effectively works of theater: a single wide shot would document the story as it unfolded. It’s only later that directors began to use diverse lenses, angles, and camera movements to infuse perspective and subjectivity into their films, telling stories rather than documenting them. For instance, she says that, “In any Spielberg movie—Jurassic Park, Close Encounters—you can see the dramatic use of the camera, like the way he pushes in on characters and the way he dollies.”

Spielberg’s dolly shots are particularly close to Madeline’s heart: she says that they have a unique power to communicate the thrill of adventure. And that’s where Madeline’s career began—with the thrill of adventure. She was nine years old the first time that she saw an Indiana Jones film, and that experience transformed her. “Raiders of the Lost Ark is the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker,” she says. And it’s also the movie that began her lifelong love affair with what she calls “adventure stories just for the sake of adventure.”

So Madeline began telling the some of those adventure stories on her own. She got her hands on a camcorder and began shooting sci-fi epics in her parents’ basement. By high school, she was shooting her first war movie—a short film about star-crossed lovers. And by her senior year of college, she was directing her first pilot at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since then, she has continued to generate a steady output of ambitious work: neo-noirs, post-apocalyptic dramas, silent films—stories of crime, of passion, and of scary, scary ghosts, be they literal or figurative.

For Madeline, it’s movement that brings these stories to life. And never was that more evident to her than during the past year, when she launched her first deep investigation into stillness. For the better part of twelve months, Madeline experimented with capturing and curating screenshots from her films, posting them to Instagram, and searching for the stories, characters, and emotions that they articulated. Much to her surprise, Madeline says that this process proved to be “useless.” She says that without movement, a film still might retain the story from which it emanates, but it loses that story’s feeling—its subjectivity. Which is precisely the same concern that she raised earlier about works of theater.

As a filmmaker, Madeline explores and crafts the movement of a film—and by extension, its subjective point of view—by storyboarding it. Storyboards are hand-drawn representations of scenes—a means by which filmmakers can pre-visualize their final products. And for many directors, these storyboards are essential to the filmmaking process. “I would never shoot a scene without a storyboard,” Madeline says. “It’s the way that you practice the scene and figure out what it’s supposed to feel like.”

While some directors and storyboard artists draw only a scene’s wide shot, Madeline prefers to draw her storyboards like comic books—shot for shot and cut for cut—so that she can explore and experience that way that the scene moves. 

But unlike comic books, these storyboards are tools, not art. And Madeline says that nobody would ever mistake them as such. “In my storyboards, all the movement is drawn with these really lame-looking arrows,” she explains. “But in my head, those arrows represent a whole world of exciting possibilities.”

In best-case scenarios, Madeline gets access to her locations and her actors before she sits down to storyboard. She says that a great location can have a profound influence on what the storyboard looks like, and that the same goes for the actors’ performances, which she can sometimes preview in rehearsals. In these ideal scenarios, storyboarding becomes a context for putting locations and rehearsals into conversation with one another before the shoot begins.

And in worst-case scenarios?

 “I just imagine it!” Madeline says. She starts by finding the perfect song to draw to—not necessarily the song that will underscore the scene in the final cut, but a song that feels right. Then she considers the scene’s beats, its shots, how it moves, where it takes the audience. And finally, she draws—in what she calls “a very loose way that only I can understand.” (The storyboards look great when Madeline draws for other directors, but like the shoe cobbler’s children, Madeline’s own films generally go barefoot.)

Once this process is complete, the final storyboard can be a tremendous resource on set. But it can also be a tremendous obstacle. Madeline says that throughout most of her undergraduate career, she followed her storyboards religiously, and that, as a result, her films came out looking stiff and lifeless—“like a play that was taped.” It wasn’t until one of her professors visited her set, took her storyboard away from her, and forced her to shoot a scene from the hip that Madeline learned the power of letting go.

Now, in her post-grad years, Madeline has made a total one-eighty. She says that “storyboards are made to be thrown away,” and she estimates that upwards of sixty percent of her storyboards get canned the moment that cameras start rolling. “Storyboards are a really great place to start, “she explains. ”They help you become familiar with how the emotion and the movement will work in your scene. But then you’ve got to let them go and respond to what’s happening spontaneously in the space.” 

Madeline describes one shoot where an unanticipated flurry of pedestrian traffic transformed a scene, effectively flooding the frame with a small army of extras. On another project, Madeline noticed that one of her actors was fidgeting with a prop during their performance, and Madeline made a spur-of-the-moment decision to build the scene around that detail.

“So, ideally it’s a few steps,” she summarizes. “First, you get familiar with the space and with the performances in rehearsals. Then the storyboard marries those two things together. And then you get on set, and you discover that the scene is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s when the storyboard becomes irrelevant.”

But, of course, the storyboard isn’t every really irrelevant. It’s still there, in Madeline’s head, informing the way that she approaches the scene, regardless of whether she’s duplicating the drawn images or reacting against them. The storyboard is the source of her films’ subjectivity—it’s where the process of defining the film’s perspective begins.

And so Madeline wonders aloud whether perhaps storyboarding might have the power to inform a play’s perspective as well—whether storyboarding a theater production might reveal ways that an ensemble could use changes of perspective to define their story’s point of view. What if a storyboard artist drew out scenes in advance, and then the ensemble adapted those drawings for the stage, we wonder.

Here, Madeline expresses a concern: “Storyboarding is such a solitary practice,” she says. She’s worried that this approach might not honor the collaborative spirit of theater-making.

And so we consider an alternative approach: one where the storyboard artist joins the ensemble as a continuous collaborator, drafting scenes on the fly as we collectively invent and explore the story that we are going to tell—its characters, its sounds, its emotions, its atmosphere. 

“The storyboard wouldn’t be literal,” Madeline says. “It would be the storyboard of how want the piece to move and feel.” She explains that the drawings would still look cinematic, and that we would have to take a fairly loose approach to adaptation in order to translate those images to the stage. But Madeline isn’t concerned about that. After all, that’s what storyboards are for: they’re made to be abandoned.

“You can’t be spontaneous if you don’t have something to stray way from,” Madeline says. “Storyboards give you something to rebel against.”

What ultimately becomes clear is that Madeline isn’t just fascinated with adventurous narratives, she’s fascinated with adventurous processes too—leaving her plans in the dust as she chases down stories at breakneck speeds, usually with a camera, but maybe next time without one.