Audio excerpt from sonic storyboard created for The Souvenir Part II (2021). Commissioned by and produced in collaboration with writer-director Joanna Hogg between 2018-19.
In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction. Joanna Hogg’s shimmering story of first love and a young woman’s formative years, The Souvenir Part II is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life — a singular, alchemic mix of memoir and fantasy.
A sonic storyboard is a form of film pre-production research that relies exclusively on sound to explore the creation of place, character and narrative on screen. It is an audio translation of a story or screenplay designed to inform and enrich a film’s creative development as the narrative progresses from page to screen. Just as a traditional storyboard artist uses illustration to convey action and inform scene composition; or a production designer employs image mood boards to express an overall visual aesthetic; so a sonic storyboard artist assembles archival recordings, music and other audio materials to concretise a story’s setting and explore its various moods and tonalities.