Page
one
Panel
1.
Up worms eye shot of a desert sand dune. On
top of a dune lies something that resembles a marker.
Panel
2.
Same view of the dune, close shot of a foot
being dug deep into the sand.
Panel
3.
Same view of the same dune, full shot of Em
close to the top of the dune, trying to crawl over it.
Panel
4.
Down birds eyeview shot of Em being on top
of the dune, next to the marker. He is looking at the vastness of the desert
lying ahead of him. I intend to have the perspective as stretched as possible.
Caption
“I was lost…”
Panel
5.
Medium long shot of Em looking tired. He is
facing the reader, having his head and shoulders tilted, his chin slightly
upwards so that light reflects from his glasses.
Panel
6.
Medium long shot of Em’s body. His knees
are bended and he seems to be collapsing.
Panel
7.
Full (worms eye
view) shot of Em on his knees. The top of the dune is seen arched to the left,
gradually disappearing in the far distance, where a strange heat distorted
figure can be seen walking towards him.
Page two.
Panel 1.
Extreme close
shot of the buffalo’s foot stirring up the sand.
Buffalo: “Find…”
Panel 2.
Extreme close up
to Em’s eyes. His head is tilted to the left, the direction of the buffalo’s
voice.
Buffalo: “The…”
Panel 3.
Caption: “And scared…”
Full (worms eye
view) shot. Em is on his knees, he realizes that next to him there’s a buffalo
skeleton talking to him. He has his arm raised and he leans to the opposite
position of where the buffalo is, as he would lean if he were trying to escape.
Buffalo: “Crow…”
Panel 4.
Medium close shot
of Em falling down due to his fright. He is involuntarily trying to cushion his
fall with his elbow.
Panel 5.
Far shot of Em
tumbling downhill. (The direction of Em’s fall will be right. Considering the
way I picture the storyboard, I want these first pages to produce an uneasy
feeling by shifting some of the actions in the panels as opposed to the normal
way of reading a page[left to right])[it’s
better explained on paper]
(This is also
necessary to point out that Em’s tendency to back down, to remain in his
comfort zone, which ends with this actual fall as it will later be seen.)
Panel 6.
Caption: “I have almost given up”
Medium shot of Em
lying silent, his arms and legs are twisted in a strange position (his right
arm going under his body to the left side where it lies in a vertical position
his right leg flexed backwards touching his posterior while his other leg is
flexed from the knee touching his left side of the thorax), face first in the
sand, after his tumultuous tumble down the dune.
Panel 7.
Em lies in a
similar position (his right arm and leg are in normal positions)
Em: “ouch”
Page three.
Panel 1.
An up (worm eye)
shot of Em getting up. He is presented in 3 positions. A medium close shot
while trying to push himself up, a medium long shot of his legs as he’s trying
to walk away (his hand position over his bended right leg hints to the hit he
received on his fall) and a far shot with him on the right of the panel looking
to the left at the sun.
Panel 2.
Down shot of Em
walking up a dune. He is presented in 4 positions. In the first one on the far
left upper corner of the panel he happily spots a huge bottle, around which the
dune swirls. On the second position he is inspecting the bottle. The third
position is a full shot of him walking up the dune, deflated by his failure to
find water. On the last pose he is in a medium long shot, struggling to climb
up the dune.
Panel 3.
Caption: “And when I did, it came to me again”
A full up shot
worm eye view of Em looking at the sky. Around him the desert unwraps its
vastness. Bottles can be seen on and around the strange dunes.
Page four.
Panel 1.
Buffalo: “Find…”
Em: “No.”
Medium close shot
of Em on his knees
Panel 2.
Buffalo: “the…”
Em: “I can’t.”
Full shot of Em
on his knees and hands, with his head down, looking tired and depressed.
Panel 3.
Buffalo: “crow…”
Close up shot.
Em’s had can be seen facing downwards, on the bottom left of the panel, the
buffalo’s boney snout can be seen on the upper right of the panel.
Panel 4.
Em: “I don’t
trust myself to do it.”
Buffalo: “trust…
don’t trust?”
Em and the
buffalo are standing face to face.
Panel 5.
Extreme close up
to Em’s face. Em looks like he just woke up. (Em’s reaction portrays a subtle
realization of his error in his way of perceiving situations that are out of
his comfort zone.)
Panel 6.
Extreme close up
to Em’s hand reaching for the buffalo’s jaw.
Panel 7.
Extreme close up
on Em’s hand being pulled by the buffalo.
Panel 8.
Medium close up
of Em clenching his fist.
Page 5.
Panel 1.
Birds eye view of
Em walking up a dune. He appears in 3 positions. An extreme far shot, a far
shot and a full shot.
Panel 2.
Long 3 shot of a
dune half covering a huge bottle. Em is presented in 3 positions. The first one
is getting down the steep angle of the dune. The second one is stumbling down,
near the bottom of the dune. The third one is resting, leaning on the bottle,
huffing and puffing. The sand near the bottle is littered with bones, and Em
doesn’t notice them.
Panel 3.
Buffalo: “Find…”
Em: “I know”
Buffalo: “The…”
Em: “I know, I’m just…”
Full single shot
of Em holding one hand on the glass of the bottle and one hand of his knee, facing
downwards and trying to catch his breath. In the background the buffalo is
facing him.
Panel 4.
Buffalo: “Cr…”
Close shot of the
buffalo.
Panel 5.
Close shot of the
buffalo turning to the right as he would have noticed something.
Panel 6.
Em: “…resting?”
Em faces upwards
and sees that the buffalo is missing.
Page 6
Panel 1.
Worm’s eye view
of the totem and the bottle that Em’s resting in the background. The totem is
holding a huge bottle that springs water. At the base of the totem, is a medium
size pond. In the background we can see Em looking amazed while facing the
buffalo’s direction. In the far background the dunes are gradually disappearing
in a misty like manner.
Panel 2.
Medium shot of Em
smiling at the realization that they found water.
Panel 3.
Close up to the
buffalo’s skull. The buffalo is drinking water. Being all bones, the water sort
of behaves like it would in 0 G. (When the buffalo sticks its snout inside the
water and the paint on his snout gets washed, leaving him without the
protection of a tattoo.)
Page 7
Panel 1.
Medium shot of
the buffalo facing Em. His head is tilted on a side; water is dripping from his
mouth. His tattoos are gone.
Buffalo: “…run”
Panel 2.
Worm’s eye view
of the buffalo being ripped apart by hands emerging from the sand.
Panel 3.
Worm’s eye view
from Em’s back, of Em falling backwards, being attacked by some of the hands
that emerged from the sand. In the background a couple of hands are
distinctively holding the buffalo’s skull.
Bones fly around,
and one of the bones pierces Em’s t-shirt, this being another reason for his
fall backwards (he tries to dodge the “bullets”)
Panel 4.
Em: “no!”
Horizontally
extremely close shot of Em, being on the ground, with hands creeping towards
him
Panel 5.
Buffalo: “run!”
Same type of shot,
this time of the buffalo’s skull being held by a couple of hands, with more
hands creeping in.
Panel 6.
Em: “no”
Same type of
shot, this time of Em is violently being grabbed and pulled by the hands that
increased in number
Panel 7.
Same type of
shot, the buffalo’s head is being ripped in half.
Buffalo: “run!”
Em: ”no!”
(I planned this
page to have a bit of a subtext. First of all the buffalo is being attacked due
to his lack of ink, his lack of tattoos. This is what happens to Em as well,
but it firstly happens to the buffalo due to his proximity to the totem. The
Mojave Indians used to believe that if you were dead and you had no tattoos at
the time of your death, after your death your spirit would be dragged into rat
holes where it would be stuck for eternity. I took this motif and gave it a bit
of a twist, considering that the whole biker god universe is some kind of
spirit world, somewhere beyond life or death with all sorts of strange things
free to happen. Second of all, I intended the “run” “no” dialogue that the
buffalo and Em have, to be a wee bit…I wouldn’t say misleading, maybe tangled
is the better word. You can interpret Em’s “no” shouts as being shouted for
more than one reason. First of all, he could be shouting “no” as a reaction to
the violent situation he is in. He is shocked and frightened, he denies the
idea that he is in a situation from which he has quite slim chances to get out
alive from. The second reason would be his empathy. He refuses to acknowledge
the certain end of the single “living” thing that helped him on his journey,
and his inability to help him in the smallest way possible. The third reason is
similar to the second one on a certain level but different. Em denies running
away, due to the realization of his frivolous will. This happened when he was
confronted with the most casual play of words that the buffalo repeated
[trust…don’t trust], in the episode that Em had admitted to have given up. In
other words, he came to the realization that if he cannot trust himself, he
cannot trust his mistrust in himself as well, and now he was confronted with a
situation that required him to trust himself. I plan on keeping the angles of page7
and the last panels on page 7 as close to horizontal, thus depicting the idea
of Em’s stillness(both mental[he is shocked, frightened, unable to comprehend
the situation] and physical[being bound to the ground and unable to move]),
besides making the threat more…menacing)
Page 8
Panel 1.
A series of close
shots and extreme reactions of Em, or a long shot of Em in different poses. Em
will grab the bone that pierced his t-shirt, and use it to fight some of the
hands. He shouts and cries and in the end a hand drops “dead” next to the buffalo’s
skull.
(I want to leave
myself the creativity to figure this out on paper. I think that it would most
likely be better resolved under the influence of spontaneity. I will probably
use a series of small panels and rush the viewer through the actions and Em’s
emotional reactions and end it with the hand close to the skull[mislead the
reader for a moment that, that hand could be Em’s]).
Panel 2.
Crow: “no...”
Extreme close up
to the skull mask that the Crow is wearing.
Panel 3.
Crow: “I
somehow don’t trust myself to believe you!”
Medium 2 shot of
the Crow stretching his bow, Em is facing us with his back, his holding his
hands up.
Panel 4.
Crow: “After all that, you had the strength to find
me? How? ”
Em: “Well…”
Medium shot of Em
holding his hands up, looking beaten up and tired. He has a faint smile,
something that is close to crying.
Panel 5.
Em: “I figured that, if you can’t trust yourself, can
you trust not trusting yourself?”
Close up to Em’s
face. He is crying and smiling at the same time. A true sincere smile and tears
in his eyes.
(There is more
than one reason that I’ve chosen to depict Em crying at the end. First of all,
he is recovering after a shock. It is normal for a human being to go through
these kinds of conflicting emotional states after serious stress or shock. The
second reason is his realization of his goal, he found the Crow, his journey
ends for the moment, and he is safe. The third reason is his empathic nature. He
mourns the death of the buffalo and realizes the help [from more than one point
of view] that the buffalo has given him. He is crying as a result of his
realization of his act of maturing, of growing up, of being aware of the
change, a process that is both hurtful and joyful.)
The End
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