Introducing THE MOOD-EUM: on moodboard-ing the stylized fictional playground of “Cumulonimbus”

• This series of articles will be facilitated by the film crew, in order to serve as case study material for junior students, film enthusiasts and explorers.
• The moodboarding process began in the early script exploratory phase and was an ongoing multi-layered journey. During pre-production, it was expanded in-depth in numerous departments (cinematography, costumes, set design). This is my subjective perception of the first mood-board researches as a writer/director. The members of the team will add their own perspectives, methodologies and approaches.

For the purpose of this article I will pre-define “mood-eum” as a multi-layered moodboard museum — an ongoing collection of visual, audio, text, eclectic media references, reuniting real or digital particles of life that inspire the sensorial layers of a fictional story-world.

Methodology-wise, moodboard-ing was one of the tools when developing “Cumulonimbus”, along with the script, research materials, improvisational techniques, film crew debates, collaborative practices.

This exercise in particular helped us complement, question and expand the sensorial abilities of the story-world. After this exercise, we debated the specificity of our story-world and later on decided on how we will create our own signature style.

It helped us define our own micro-universe of exploratory solitude, togetherness, joy, disappointment, controversy filtered in this contemporary fairytale. We then found it easier to create a particular signature style of the film: look-wise, sound-wise, flow-wise, meaning-wise.

Before becoming a film with an inconic cinematic style of its own, “Cumulonimbus” was an evolving mood-eum for almost five years. The researched references tended to change over time, however not substantially.

What we knew from the beginning & what we discovered along the way

We knew from the beginning that we aim to create an intimate, personal, sensorial film. Almost as a cinematic haiku split into beats. As if “Cumulonimbus” would become a fictional world easily recognizable out of many. We knew we want to play creatively with daringly meaningful image compositions, chromatic architectures, group choreographies, gestures, body postures that would all create the micro-society. We knew we wanted to aim for visual humor at times and for a form of bitter-sweet-ness. We knew we wanted to play with symmetries and asymmetries, as most of the characters are in search of a form of inner and outer harmony.

We curated our mood-eum having these layers in mind.

We discovered very few films that have approached similar themes in a highly stylized manner. In the Romanian cinema context, our approach is rather rare. We researched mostly photographs, sounds, amateur videos, music videos, complemented by oral stories, interviews, quotes from news and books.

Inner Methodologies

In film school, we are rarely introduced to the in-depth process of moodboard-ing. For my generation, this was hardly an academic topic — if any at all. Through this current project specifically, I tend to argue that a project’s mood-eum can become a highly meaningful exercise that may have a similar weight to the classical processes of an outline, treatment, script, storyboard.

Moodboards can act not only as a sensorial inspirational path, as a hands-on research platform, but also as a form of dialogue, as a form of expanded contextualization, as a form of collaborative dialogue.

If scripts are written in Final Draft and rarely invite to collaboration or notes from the team members, moodboards are easily participatory.

As a child and teenager, I was dominantly a visual learner in school which brought me almost naturally to this path. Later on, I became unconsciously fascinated by mood-driven infrastructures (such as, for example, Noetic Moods, meant to juxtapose visuals from various corners of the web into organic feelings). I have practiced moodboard-ing more extensively after graduation, mostly when creating directorial treatments for commercial projects. I then conserved it as one of the most constructive lessons taken from the commercial world.

I still find it hard to theorize it fully, as it is perceived as a fully informal and at times irrelevant practice. Moreover, although not practiced enough, it is often even stigmatized. Some professionals from the cinema field may consider moodboards a waste of time, or a way to alienate our own personal puristic vision. I personally find it a meaningful practice — especially because it invites you to research, to put your work in context, to boldly challenge specific sensorial, visual, audio practices.

It is hard to quantify the amount of research or time spent to gather moodboard materials as to me it almost feels as an ongoing practice. I am an almost-weekly moodboard collector. In the digital or real world. A digital archaeologist, in a way.

My computer desktop resembles often to a genuinely messy mood-eum (moodboard museum). I gather virtual reminiscences of personal memories of myself and others, of events, esthetics, graphics encountered on daily searches. I tend to value even what seems to become in time “useless”. In fact, I have a fascination for what becomes useless and why. Back in the days, I used to structure them all chronologically: “Moods January”, “Moods February”, “Moods March” almost naively, as if time alone would alter or enrich them. In time, I began to group them on themes, on principles, on feelings. I still seek alternative ways to archive them.

When a specific project arises, a specific folder gets added up. That folder starts slowly to add complementary or contradictory elements in connection to the story world.

Outer methodologies

While scriptwriting:

Throughout the script development phase, I often research visuals, sounds and textures in parallel. It is almost like a scout of finding one’s self in others and others in one’s self. I believe in Youngblood’s collective consciousness and moodboard-ing is to me a way of expressing it.

For this particular project, we were mostly inspired by remote communities, picturesque practices from various cultures, games, rituals.

While pre-producing:

For “Cumulonimbus” we have made digital scrapbooks of images, spoken word excerpts, sounds, motions, that was enriched over time. Given the long time-span, the moodboard itself has gone through changes, being often over-eclectic. As the story got simplified, it curated itself.

Practice-wise, we had a mood-eum of the project archived in Google Drive, in order to give access to each key member of the team to visualize, but also to adjust, add, erase elements of it (the editing practices were not always used as much as they could have been). We used editable Slideshows.

Many of the key department artists created also additional moodboards for costumes, set design, locations. Almost as complementary exhibits displayed in the mood-eum.

Some of the elements included in our general moodboard were:

© author unknown, but would gladly credit him/her when known. We were highly inspired by the spirit of this visual. It carries with it a form of serenity. It invited us to free ourselves when creating the wedding scene.

© author unknown, but would gladly credit him/her when known. As our characters were a collective, we have researched and we were often inspired by group photos, by patterns. What is specific to us humans in how we display our bodies when we are in a group? How is the architecture of a group modified when we play, when we contemplate, when we travel?

© author unknown, but would gladly credit him/her when known. While researching, we were curious about means of visual humor in the rural world. We have loved this photograph and its mix of spontaneity and geometry. It inspired us to dive deeper into the specificities of the community where we have filmed the project.

© author unknown, but would gladly credit him/her when known. This visual, among many, inspired us to value non-human elements as characters. In our case, there are several non-human elements that began to have a recurrently meaningful role. The tree becomes a characters in itself, almost as a portal.

While aftermath-ing

Is the mood-eum closed after the film is done? I personally like to believe it is not.

Generally we could continue to enrich it, regardless of the continuation of the cinematic project.

Specifically for Cumulonimbus, as we aim to continue the story world on complementary transmedia platforms, this is certainly a playground to be constantly enriched and refreshed.

Although now we have already built a specific grammar of the story world, there are elements that will be certainly recontextualized, re-debated, re-discussed, re-evaluated.

Can moodboard-ing be helpful?

For this particular project, we have found moodboard-ing in particular helpful, as we have created a contemporary fairytale with an intimate style of its own.

By collecting complementary materials, researching and debating extensively, in parallel to the script, it allowed us to enrich the cinematic approach.

These were some of the roles of a moodboard that I have kept:

• created an universal cloud of materials complementary to the atmosphere of the story
• sparked debates among the film crew on creating a particular other-world-ness feel of the film
• contextualized our cinematic piece
• helped us create a visual and sensorial dialogue with the children, that did not know at that time how to write or read fluently

This mood-eum was often our philosophical agora. We were questioning ourselves and questioning others. How can we depart from the regular audio-visual grammars? How can we define the most personal, intimate qualities of this story? How are children usually portrayed in Romanian and international cinema? How do we aim to create a more profound and multi-layered portrait? How are rituals often depicted? What do we want to achieve with our current approach? How can we create an innovative hybrid grammar of the film? One that encompasses the stylized fiction layers, but also the improvisational, exploratory ones?

Can moodboard-ing be harmful?

Like anything in this world, there are ideal and non-ideal practices. I do believe excessive adherence to a moodboard can lead to altering the voice of a particular story world. Moodboards may distort the style of a film too, if taken over-literally. For us moodboard-ing was used as a key-ingredient to spark debates, to contextualize, to add layers to a story world. We mostly took it as an expanded research process.

Future questions

Shall we introduce classes of extensive classes of moodboarding in film schools? When can a moodboard become a destructive practice rather than a constructive one? How diverse should a mood-eum be? Is there value in eclectism?

Future challenges

How can we archive a collaborative mood-eum? How can we transparentise these practices more? Would knowing the process lead to a better understanding of the film? How to facilitate more collaborative infrastructures for creating mood-eums, accessible to the film crew, actors or even to the public? How can we analyze the complexity of a mood-eum? How can we enrich a mood-eum in time, without becoming digressive?

*This is a brief excerpt of a multi-layered contemplative process.

#themoodeum #cumulonimbus #storyscapes