This summer my band played its final show. We’ve been playing shows all over the country and making music together for almost 10 years, and as part of a big final show, we also put out a new record. One of the songs really struck me as one that could be representative of our sound, our approach, and was something that I wanted to provide a visual accompaniment in a music video.

So I sat down and listened to the song repeatedly. And I began doing sketches. Here are my initial sketches of ideas and brainstorms:

After this initial set I wanted to group these ideas into sets of possible scenes, or portions of scenes. I was hanging on to the idea that I wanted to represent how our physical world and digital presence is blurred, and they are both intertwined within our minds. The last example shown above illustrates a “road map” for me to follow when developing the storyboard.

I wanted there to be a dangerous element introduced into the story because I’m interested in exploring the idea of devious behaviors that develop because of a purely digital relationship with another person. In my storyboard, this is initially described to the audience by initially portraying one of the main characters as the source of the dramatic events, only to discover later that the two main characters were merely victims of circumstance.