Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521473
HOPPING ON BOARD Getting into the psychology of the story means reading between the lines of dialogue—Jara says he will read a script numerous times: "Maybe the 12th time you read a sequence, you'll realize, oh, that's what's happening." There might be "a vibe" that the audience won't pick up on right away, and once he understands what that is, he'll write down his thoughts. And if any references come to mind, he might look them up and study them on YouTube. For example, in Episode 8, working on a sequence between one of his favorite X-Men characters—Beast—and a secretly evil reporter, Jara needed to "figure out how to build that tension and have it explode at the end where [the reporter] reveals who she is." He turned to a segment he remembered from Bladerunner 2049 where one of the police chiefs is killed. "They're very different scenes," he says, "[but] it reminded me—there's two characters in a room. One character's about to try to attack [the other], but we don't know it's going to happen… The switch when you know something is going to go wrong is what I liked." Taking inspiration from the timing of the beats to build tension, Jara chose specific lines for the reporter to make deliberate actions. The scene begins with the reporter bringing Beast hot cocoa as an apology for something that happened previously. "She hands it to him, but once [Beast] starts explaining what he is doing, she carefully puts the cocoa down," he says. These cuts, from Beast talking to a close-up on the reporter's face to a close-up on her hand with the cup as she in turn asks a seemingly innocent question, is subtle, but it cues the viewer to the turning point moment. "I wanted this to give the audience the signal that she's not really here to chat and drink hot chocolate," Jara says. Determining the underlying vibe of the script is also how Storyboard Artist Cassey Kuo gets to the heart of the story. "I realized early on that when I just went off the [dialogue], I would lose a lot of … connective tissue," she says. "That led me to—oh, I should write out every beat." These beats help her establish emotional arcs. "I feel like every scene has its own little rising action, climax, falling action," she says. Within a scene, something will happen, no matter how small, to change the characters. "I want to make sure I'm tracking that," she says. This also helps her mitigate choice paralysis: "I want to craft that path so I don't accidentally board myself into a corner. I think the writing upfront helps me clearly state my intentions for the scene and the shot." F E AT U R E F E AT U R E 28 KEYFRAME