The Mirror Court
An open-air art pavilion of reflection and light. A short film tracing the project from drawing to dusk, in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne.
A storyboard is where an idea learns to move. Before a single frame is rendered, the sequence has to hold: what the camera sees, in what order, and why each move earns the next. This is the six-beat storyboard for a short film about the Mirror Court, a mirror-finish roof floating over Fitzroy Gardens on a forest of slender columns.
Each scene below pairs the frame with its camera move and its intent. The film runs from the drawing on the wall to the pavilion alive at dusk.
From drawing to dusk.
The Concept
Slow dolly into the axonometric, settling on the central void.
Open on the idea itself, a mirror-finish roof floating over Fitzroy Gardens, drawn as a presentation board. Let the drawing breathe before it becomes real.
The Logic
Gentle left-to-right pan across the section, resolving on the central elm.
The cross-section reveals the mechanism: three elms rising through the plane, sunlight raining through perforations, the garden doubled in still water.
The Approach
Track forward with the visitors, drifting toward the threshold.
Cut to the ground. We arrive on foot through the elms, St Patrick's spires behind, the silver roof hovering low ahead, an invitation, not a wall.
The Heart
Rise from the light-dappled bluestone up the trunk to the canopy and the open void.
Inside now. The perforations scatter a constellation of light across the court; a single elm climbs through the roof into open sky. Stillness.
The Doubling
Crane up off the water and tilt to the ceiling, revealing the mirrored world overhead.
The payoff. Look up, the polished soffit doubles the court, the columns, the trees, the people. Above and below become one continuous reflected garden.
Nightfall
Slow aerial orbit over the glowing roof as day turns to night.
The finale. After dark the perforations ignite into a field of stars and the pavilion reads as a lantern in the gardens, the end product, fully alive.
A building you can film before you build it is a building you understand. The storyboard is the cheapest place to test whether an idea can carry an audience from the first frame to the last.