Documentary Filmmakers wear many hats. Today, I wore the graphics hat designing our Film’s Poster. For us as archival and art-centric documentarians, the work of a film becomes very layered. This film is about a special place in time and the generations of preservationists and conservationists who still protect and preserve these lands. The graphics we chose for our film poster needed to represent the key character in the film it’s location, Flat Rock, North Carolina. While this image represents a place that has changed very little in the last 130 years. This bending and blurring of time takes us to the heart of our story, the histories of the land, the people and its culture. It presents a vista for our viewers to pause, consider and appreciate what a group of like minded citizens can do to become stewards of the land.

Storyboarding is crucial to filmmaking. The storyboard is essential to the film’s bone structure. For us as filmmakers, whose focus is archival as well as artful, we use storyboarding to map our film’s design as well as its progress. It becomes a physical staging platform to display all of the film’s components, such as the film’s scope, style, segment breakdown and scheduling. We display layouts in a timeline, switching out in real time changes as needed. This method gives us a quick reference point, color keyed into a visual record of a film’s progress. We can then share our vision easily with our production team, producers and clients. Here’s an example of a storyboard of our most recent film. It shows the details of the film’s production development as it happens. For me, the heart of a film begins with the editing process in post-production. This is where the weaving of thousands of bits of information can be shaped into meaningful film moments. The storyboard helps me to gather all of the elements together into one place before I sit down to edit.