The White Devil was one of the more challenging projects that I worked on while at NYU. Because of the challenges I had with the script, I used the process to help streamline how I worked on a piece. One of my other main difficulties that I went through was working with a more abstract set than I was used to, essentially a "large box" that was going to be a visual element I would have to deal with one way or another in every scene.

When I first began, I only had one or two solid visual images that I wanted to show, I was having more trouble than I was used to in developing a concept that could be structured to fit into the show as a whole. I quickly sketched them out on a yellow legal pad. I then went through and filled in the rest of the show, not really sure where I was going with some of the scenes (slides 1-4).

This was still a very loose visual idea however, so I reworked them in a more formal setting, jotting general notes and ideas on the sides, in terms of color and where I wanted to focus the audience's attention (slides 5-8). I was still having trouble visualizing how I was going to deal with the large box of the scenery however, and my next sketches added color and assisted me in understanding how I was going to deal with the space (slides 9-12).

Finally, in order to more further clarify how I was going to deal with the characters in the space, I took a digital photo of the set and used a pencil to darken in the set and a white out pen to draw in the characters with an initial idea of how they were going to be illuminated (sketches 13-18).

The entire process took much less time than expected and the storyboards that I had essentially created along the way made the model photos taken at the end of the process (available online here) a much smoother step than I was used to.

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