American Film Institute, Los Angeles, during my visit for the Storyboarding Workshop

Last night, Mary and I went to see the movie La La Land. I quite liked the movie, although I was disappointed that they seemed to lose the “LA feel” towards the end. I haven’t lived in LA, but I have visited many times in connection with my work, and there’s a definite “vibe” to the area that’s not at all the same as the ambience here in Northern California. The movie seemed to capture that vibe well at first, but then it fizzled out towards the end.

Coincidentally, I’m writing a technical blog article that discusses Storyboarding. During the 1990s, a storyboard artist called Marcie Begleiter presented weekend workshops on Storyboarding technique at the American Film Institute in LA. I attended one of the workshops, and it was a very interesting and informative event. Many of the AFI’s classes took place off-site, but the Storyboarding workshop was at the main site, where I took the photo at the top of this article.

The sample below shows part of a storyboard that I drew at that workshop. The script was a 1940s-era film noir story, hence the period costumes and transport. Everything was  drawn quickly “on the fly” in the class, without reference material. It was a case of “What You Imagine is What You Get”!

Excerpt from Storyboard strip, which I created at AFI

Perhaps that is the true “La La Land”: a world conjured up purely from your own imagination?