Novels written by the Un-Tied Artist design studio are first laid out in the same way animated feature-length films are done, using storyboards. This page gives you a peek behind the scenes, at the evolution of a few storyboards and the prose featuring these settings.
Here is some prose featuring this storyboard, taken from Chapter 10 of Wire ...
“New York’s overcast sky released a sliver of lingering sunlight, buttering the hood of my cab when it dragged to a stop at Rockefeller Center. I walked briskly through Channel Gardens toward the golden boy statue and the General Electric Building. The GE skyscraper stood like a huge brown monument etched with thousands of black holes. The “holes” were deeply tinted windows running in columns up the skyscraper’s façade. I let the GE Building’s revolving door swallow me in its blades.”
This storyboard was used in the opening to chapter 11 of Wire … “Fulton Fish Market isn’t home to sardines and crabs so much as it’s a home for Yuppies and Dinks. They go there for retail therapy, making Visa and MasterCard happy. Nobody visits the Fulton Market to buy fish anymore. That smelly business is around the corner, discretely conducted in the early morning, when snappers and lobsters arrive in a fleet of trucks, not inside the icy holds of trawlers. ... From noon on, the area belongs to tourists. Near sunset, the locals drift home from work and settle into their upscale condos. Taverns and restaurants come alive at night, with jazz riffs lilting into the street until the refrigerated fish trucks arrive again, unloading in the pink light of dawn.”
This colored pencil sketch influenced
the opening prose in chapter 4 of Wire …
“NYPD still had Canal and Baxter sealed with barricades, staffed by a dozen cops I’d never met. With these guys, my press credentials were useless, as was my girlish charm. Even residents couldn’t get past the barriers. I leaned against the cleanest building I could find, watching sunlight fade across the Schwab brokerage pagoda. The brokerage was closed but its neon tickertape still marched like army ants, ticking off prices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, London, you name it. A Starbucks in the pagoda’s ground floor became my “office,” where I nursed a Java Chip Frappuccino and tried to call Saul. Mercifully, the battery on my cell phone was dead. The unhappy store manager made a point of asking every few minutes if I wanted to buy another drink. I ran out of cheerful ways to say no and resumed my watch outside, elbows resting on a police barricade.”
Chapter 1 Storyboards With Excerpts From Wire
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