Mood Boards 1 - Cassini

The very first mood board for Cass.

I’ve always made mood boards, like… always.

I don’t know if it’s the marketer in me, or whether I need a visual to work to from my time directing stuff, but I found that often there’s no better way to convince someone of your half formed vision than spending some time scrapbookin’ stuff together until it looks like a thing. A real, actual thing.

We have this thing in the marketing world I like to call the imagination gap.

It’s where the idea of something in your head is so huge and so complete that it feels real enough to touch. You can see the entirety of its being in 360 and hold it up from any angle and examine it.

But often, when you ‘sell’ it to others it falls flat. They can’t see it yet. They can maybe see a part of it, maybe the potential, maybe not, but they don’t quite ‘get it.’

That’s the imagination gap.

It’s the space where the thing inside your head isn’t quite reaching out across the void and grabbing the audience with both hands. It’s not always the fault of the writer / creative / marketer, it’s more about translating and distilling a vision so precisely that the other person fully leans in and gets it.

It takes time and practice. It takes patience and revision. It takes a little luck.

Everything I’ve ever sold or believed in has managed to cross the imagination gap somehow. I’m talking, big advertising jobs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or silly ‘weird on paper’ schemes that went on to be runaway successes.

When I first started writing the Dirty 6th Series I NEEDED to do something familiar. I needed to make mood boards to anchor me and my spiralling mind from running off in a million different directions. I needed to close my own imagination gap and remind myself why I was capable of telling this story and convincing others to come along for the ride.

I thought maybe if I could nail the vision enough that it made sense to me at a glance that I could look back whenever I was feeling lost about a character or a place or a vibe and be instantly transported to that headspace.

And you know what? It worked?

With that in mind, here’s the first mood board for Cas, the hero of Inked and Bloodbound. I think what I was trying to capture most of all was a ‘vibe.’ Somewhere between catholic guilt and bloody danger. Something that felt very much about a man who values his home and his things and a sense of pride and belonging. Things that brings a sense of peace and familiarity for a man who is untethered…

For some reason, as simple as it is, whenever I look at this, I can switch quickly into his headspace which is erm… handy when hopping around POVs.

Anyway, until next time.

May xx