S&V / Week 4 / Storyboards and Synopsis

I partnered up with Paula Leonvendagar and Sejo Vega-Cebrián to work on our video portrait of an international student from China living in New York for the first time. One of the creative challenges of this project is that it will be an anonymous portrait where we will not reveal her face but concentrate on her words and the images of Chinatown. Below is our synopsis and storyboards for her story.

STORYBOARDS
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SYNOPSIS
Looking for 我最喜欢的洗发水
It’s her first time in Chinatown, she just arrived from China to New York as an international student studying in the United States. In this colorful and fascinating neighborhood, we walk with her. Listening to her thoughts and first impressions about the city, and this city inside the city.

Chinatown. Is it like mainland China for her? Or is it different? Does she like the food, the places, the people? Can she find a little bit of home here? How does this international student from China feel in a tight-knit community of Chinese-Americans?

Through this anonymous portrait with a subjective sight, we follow a fresh perspective on the Chinese community in New York City and take a glimpse into the mysterious culture of China.

 

TREATMENT
This small 3-5 minutes piece will be a point of view of our character and her experiences around the town, though we will work mostly with a handheld camera as her P.O.V. Despite this we will use some wide shots to settle our character in the context of the big city and it ́s visual richness. We will never see her face, just her silhouette, shadow and her tiny body lost in the multitude of the town. We want to keep this anonymous voice that will help to maintain a poetic mystery through the piece and also to get deeper into her intimate perceptions. We want to capture both, her fresh and sharp sight and all the intensity and beauty of Chinatown.

The sound will be composed through the narrative of her voice, the sounds of the city and some music. In the music we will mix new compositions and traditional music from China, to create the feeling of contrast in between different generations from China.

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