The mood board is one of the most important aspects of my work as I start to plan pre production. It's a tool I use to share my vision and to share the project with other people who may be interested in it, you have to put elements of art direction, color, texture, film references, the mood of the film you want to reference. And in general, you have to put elements of the universe you want to create. If you are going to make a visual spectacle or something that's very, you know, defined, that's not just a standard film shot in a room with auto mode on you need to have a defined vision. So that's why I use a whiteboard. It's the most important aspect of my work when I start to create a project and that's what I used to share with people to get them on board with, with the film.

So it's, it's an easy way to convey what you want to do. Without you know, speaking too many words as the saying goes, I you The internet for the mood board. As you know, most people do. We as indie filmmakers don't have necessarily the money to pay concept artists to create our vision for us. But thankfully, most of what you have in your mind has probably already been done on the internet in some way, shape or form. So you can get at least you know, 60 80% of what you want.

And by combining different elements, you can really convey what you really want to your art director. So giving the images to the art director, usually, that person is going to take that single image and find other images that are related, or that inspires them to the project. So finding images online is fairly simple. And it's a matter of, you know, digging into the wormhole of images online, you have to have patience. Sometimes one image will give you tons of different other images you didn't expect. And as you go through these, you'll find other things that inspire you even more And these things are what surprises you and will bring something different to the project something's then not just you know, the initial idea that you have.

So in terms of the mood board, you have to figure out what makes your universe different. Is that CGI monsters? Is that the colors? Is it the special technology that's in it, there's different rules that apply to the universe. You have to really think about that and figure out a way to show it with the mood board. This is going to help frenzy division, get actors talons crew on board and help them see what you see in your mind.

And then it can be very simple. It doesn't need to be a complicated thing. You can use the apps that are available online. There are many of those but I usually just use a simple word document. And I'll separate it by sections environment, lighting, colors, textures, technology, or you know specific locations that you have access to So I try to keep it very simple again to streamline the process and also not spend too much time on something that is meant for internal purposes only because it's mostly you and your crew that's going to see this so it doesn't need to be perfect, but it does help a lot to have something refined. A few examples of mood boards I've used before in Akira, I wanted to have a very cyberpunk Look, I wanted to have a lot of fog, as you can see in these reference pictures.

So what happened on set is that I had a fog machine that basically was active the entire set, and we fought the entire film with it. It created this texture in this depth that was really interesting. combining that with the use of old morphic lenses, we managed to create a look that felt very cinematic and expensive, more expensive than what our budget could afford. But it gave us that blockbuster look that I was talking about in temple. You can see in these mood boards, I had lightning references I had walls Texture references. So it really was a clear way to share with the, you know, the lighting team and the art direction team what I wanted, you can also see, the costume we had for us was inspired by all these looks, we wanted to have a hood, we wanted to keep a sort of red hue to the costume and through the entire film, and this is what we came up with in the end.

The other thing to remember in the Woodward is that you have to be specific, it's not so much putting a lot of images into just, you know, show people what you like, but you have to really define your vision because otherwise, people will be confused and you won't have a clearer direction for the team to follow. I usually keep less images in the mood board and really only keep exactly what I think will be used in the project. Also, you don't necessarily need to have specific specific images in the mood board. As I mentioned, sometimes the internet will only give you 60 80% of what you want. So in this example, on Akira, we needed to create the Cooling chamber, I did not have a shot of a cooling chamber. So I use a an image that reflected the texture, the lighting and the hue that I wanted, which is this metallic hue and I recreated that in a cooling chamber shot which became one of my favorite shot.

So it really gave the artist an idea of the mood and the tone of the shot. But then it's not necessarily the specific elements in the shot those you have to describe yourself and you have to work with the artists to get to that point.