Today is my first full day back from two months away. It’s the kind of day that’s good for looking back & saying thank-you, and for taking stock & looking on. Some thoughts came to mind that I want to remind myself of over the next short season. To keep them front & centre I made this image.

From early 2008…

I haven’t posted many sketchpads yet… a backlog of ideas to process and publish. Here’s one I thought of today: the internet is a great aggregator of lists. Google is the aggregator of these lists. Who will be the Google of the iPhone internet?

This is an initial sketch of the Rwanda: Hope Rises storyline. Normally I would do this on a sketchpad, but this whiteboard came in handy (it’s in the conference room of Savvy Productions, home of the docs’ cinematographer.)

Admittedly this is just a sketch, and structurally it represents mostly how we move through the story. Expanding on this is where my sketchpad comes in – creating character sketches, adding sequence and tension, creating a beat chart, etc.

Click the image to get a closer view.

Incidentally, this is the first in what may be a series of “sketchpad posts”. My sketchpad has become my most important workspace – freeform thoughts limited by analog boundaries and permanence. I use it to bounce ideas back to myself and see how they work together. Sometimes they’re interesting or informative, so I’ll experiment with posting them here. For now these will remain off the main blog, but if you keep track of this feed you can see what comes of it.