Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546606
R E S I D E N T E V I L | P E R S P E C T I V E 4 5 On my first day with director Zach Cregger, we were discussing his movie, Barbarian, when I admitted, "It took me three sittings to get through it," to which he replied, "Why would you tell me that?" "Because it scared the $#!% out of me." It was true. I have a complicated relationship with horror; I love the genre. It has stakes, it's imaginative, it holds a fundamental structure: Kill the monster before it kills you. The genre produced many of my favorite films and launched the careers of almost all of my favorite directors. There's one big problem—I get legitimately terrified by good horror. I slept with the lights and TV on for three days after watching Se 7 en in theaters. I will never watch The Exorcist again, not even clips. The beautiful thing about horror films is that they demand precision with shot selection; the director must masterfully draw out the emotional response from the audience—often with minimal resources. On this project, I got to contribute to that precision. I have worked on numerous horror pictures, but the specificity of Zach's filmic vernacular and the meticulousness of his shot selection were unique. Storyboarding is the art of drawing badly quickly, mitigating the badness without compromising the quickness. The method that Zach wanted to use for this film leveraged these qualities and perfectly suited the contained, direct and visceral nature of Resident Evil. We would get on a Zoom call, and I would share my screen—and then Zach would dictate the shots. He would do this on the spot, as though reciting the already-made movie from his head. I would draw as least badly as I could as quickly as I could, averaging 30-90 seconds per thumbnail drawing. We would go for a couple of hours and then, when Zach could tell his powers were waning, we would stop. A sort of spell would break, and we were able to look back at the film concretizing from the ether, conjured from spoken word and scribbled out in pixels. He'd hop off the call, and I would finish out the drawings, slightly less quickly, drawn slightly more less badly. Then we'd repeat the process for several more days before taking a week-and- a-half apart, for me to continue less badifying. In the interval, he'd repeat this process with the other artists and then he'd cycle back around to me. Rinse and repeat. MATERNITY WARD ROUGHS.