PBC - Script 001

Scripts are in!

I am very pleased to report that PBC stuck to their end of the bargain and provided some scripts. They sent along some bullet pointed versions before the final script so we can get thinking about what the final script might contain. Which is fabulous because it keeps the ball rolling on this side!

Here's what they sent me:

"WHAT IS PBC?

What is PBC: (While in the majority of cases it is their mother who has PBC, we have members who have foster children as well as those who seek support for their grandchildren, so I am reluctant to add mum or parent to the title.)

• ·       PBC stands for Primary Biliary Cholangitis
• ·       It is something that makes the person who has it unwell.
• ·       PBC affects the liver ( chemical factory)
• ·       Once you have PBC, it never goes away.
• ·       No one knows why.
• ·       What happens? The body attacks itself ( own goal, civil war, family fight between sisters)
• ·       It all happens slowly, not overnight, it’s gradual.
• ·       More woman get it than men.
• ·       There are medicines people can take to help.

When doctor says someone who matters to you has PBC it can be scary, but knowing more helps. PBC stands for Primary Biliary Cholangitis. Those are some big words that are no less scary. So let’s break that down. What is PBC? It is a condition that makes the person who has it unwell.

The organs in our body work together as a giant factory each doing different jobs. The liver has a few jobs, the three important ones are:

1. 1.     It is takes the vitamins and minerals and other things from your stomach.
2. 2.     Then turns them into something all the other organs can understand. (Transformer of some sort.. or someone trying to put a video in a dvd player, oil refined into petrol)
3. 3.     It also cleans our blood because sometimes we eat things that as a treat that don’t just make our hands dirty but also our blood. (food going through a sieve/ colander)

 No one knows why people get PBC, there are some ideas that maybe it happens because the security guard of the body (the immune system) doesn’t work properly.  Instead of defending the body from diseases, it gets confused and starts attacking the liver instead. This means that the liver isn’t able to do its job properly.

Once someone has it, it never goes away, but they cannot give it to other people. You won’t catch PBC from someone like you might catch a cold.

PBC is a condition that moves slowly, a person who has won’t feel so good and will have some days worse than others. More woman have it than men do. There is medicines that can help.

Our next video talks about how PBC feels to someone who has it. " 

I was very pleased when I received this. It was exactly what they promised me. It was to the point but not too intimidating or scary. It said what needed to be said without any of the hugely technical jargon that might confuse children or become boring or be hard to represent in visual imagery. Which were all huge bonus' for me because it left me a huge degree of control over the visuals as they included example visuals they wanted and metaphors they thought would be good. I knew this meant they had kept in mind the huge simplification of the material that was needed. I was feeling pretty positive at this stage. So in order to keep up the workflow I produced a storyboard at this stage to start the thinking process.

As you can probably tell already, I scrapped this one pretty quick in. Not because I didn't like the things I had in it but because I messed it up a little bit in terms of what I thought would be useful to show my clients. At this stage above I was making the storyboard for me. Jumping from one bullet point of information to another. It wasn't until this stage in the construction of my storyboard that I realised it wasn't going to help Rob, Robert and Kelda understand the film at all. As my entire film hinged on these transitions scenes. I didn't want to assume they knew what I meant when I suggested the images would morph from one into the next. So I started again...

I was pretty excited about this second storyboard because I loved some of the things I had included in it. I wasn't so excited about things like the VCR to DVD converter but it was one of the suggestions PBC had made themselves so to satisfy their needs I included it, at least at this stage. I didn't really feel it was working or that the reference would be clear to 8 - 12 year olds. I do remember videos becoming obsolete halfway through my childhood, so the likelihood of a child of 12 remembering them are remote to say the least. While I'm on the subject of the VCR scene I might as well mention that I found it's transitioning rather difficult. As you can see from the storyboard I simply had it morph from a liver, then following that I didn't even bother! Just another reason I didn't want to include that metaphor. We just couldn't work together. There's a lot of the transitions I am happy with I love the entirety of the run from the sieve to the bodyguard. I wanted to badly to mess around with the idea of the media of the visuals. Which is why I have the character appear physical and 3 dimensional by having drips land on it but then fall over as if it was flat and 2 dimensional. I thought that might be funny and engage children. I also just really liked it as a transition. To be fair to this storyboard a lot of it just felt natural. Elements matched up like waving hands that could just wave themselves away or the potential implied heaviness of the female gender symbol. (honestly I loved that part that's why I made a gif!) Thought it was fun and playful and simple. Exactly what I wanted it to be.

When it came to angles here I thought it best to avoid to much camera movement. I wanted to keep the camera still but have the things move and spin around it. I think it maybe helps ground the viewer. A lot of this is really confusing and I don't want to confuse them further. There's sort of a juxtaposition between what they feel in real life and what they will feel in this film I think. The film, much like their life for a small spell, will swirl and move and they'll feel pretty isolated. That's why we're making these films. We don't want them to feel like that and I think that managed to be reflected in the style of movement I've chosen. The camera barely moves if at all. The viewer remains a constant. 

I didn't include much colour in this storyboard. I kind of feel like it gets confusing when you're trying to portray that much information to include colour. I at least get lost and since it's me working from them I really can't be getting lost now can I? I did however include colour in places where the colour was necessary to help me tell the story. I didn't feel like the character at the beginning, intended to be of ill health, would be accurately represented if he wasn't green. Green faces have pretty much become synonymous with illness in cartoons. Other than that I like my storyboards black and white. It helps me see clearly. And if I can see it nice and clearly there's a bigger likelihood my clients can too.

I also took some time to create some concept art and bits and pieces at this stage about some elements I was seeing a bit more vividly because I was excited by them and needed the ideas down on paper. One of them I really took to was the idea of a body guard. a guard of the body but inside the body. But like we know he does not work. And when I first heard this my initial thinking was not "oh because it can't work because it's sick, it was it won't work because it's lazy!" The implications of which I realise suggest that it is partially to blame but i am planning on addressing that, don't worry! Here's that original concept sketch!