2. Mood board

Once I had been commissioned, and before starting on the script, I began making a mood board. This was to help me get a sense of the look of the film from colour palette, to character and prop design. I find that sometimes ideas come to me more freely when I am just sitting doing something else, so I thought this would be a good way to get a fresh perspective on the narrative.

Two artist's that I greatly admire are Tim Walker and Wes Anderson. Their work often has a playful, innocent quality which is underscored by dark and serious themes. Imagery from Walker's photographs and Anderson's films (especially in terms of colour) really influenced the look of this short. For example Anderson's beautiful film Moonrise Kingdom takes place, for the most part, in a woodland setting and the Scouts wear khaki/cardboard coloured uniforms. So I thought that a similar colour palette would really compliment my characters in their very comparable environment.

I found this board very helpful when having preliminary talks with my DP Pete Ellmore. Looking at it, he was able to get a real sense of what I wanted to do with the visuals quite early on. This gave him time to think about how he could achieve this in camera with lenses and filters. This is something that I really like to do, and really admire Pete for. I love the idea of creating the look as much as possible for real on the shoot, rather than doing it in post. Then when you arrive at that stage it's just a question of enhancing and polishing what you already have, rather than creating from scratch.