storyboarding a shadow film: QUILT OF STARS

In fall 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s educational department asked me to create a shadow puppet film around their February exhibition of quilts for an at-home quarantined family audience. In our initial meeting they emphasized the themes they were looking for were family heritage and coziness.

There is an heirloom quilt in my family made by my mother from scraps of our clothing, so I had that to go on. But the the passing down the skill of sewing became a stand-in for the art of puppetry my grandfather passed down to me, and I made the quilter a grandfather in his honor.

I’d also recently seen the military quilts made by soldiers at the American Folk Art Museum so I knew there was a tradition of men quilting, and I imagined many of those soldiers may have passed the skill onto their grandchildren.

By the end of my meeting with LACMA I had a rough story framework worked out in my mind.

STORYBOARD #1

The rough first try at organizing the narrative interspersed with flashbacks to family history.

STORYBOARD #2

Revised and refined compositions and sequences of shots. More work on character design.

STORYBOARD #3

Final storyboard. Silhouette characters inserted, and color added digitally to distinguish the flashbacks corresponding to specific items of clothing used in the quilt. Color proved to be an important vehicle in clarifying this story about fabric and the people and times associated with each fabric. I also wanted to progress from a more traditional monochromatic shadow world for the present, into an Oz-like technicolor finale.

ANIMATIC

Final color storyboard imported into Premiere Pro with the composer’s final music track and narration.

FINAL FILM

Quilt of Stars, as it was presented online by the Los Angeles County Museum of art in February 2021, with original music composed and performed by Travis Knapp, with Annie Sumi lending vocals.