Moodboard

What this is about

Words about images are slippery; moodboards end the ambiguity. When the director says gritty and the client hears dark, the board settles who is right before wardrobe buys a single costume. Production design pulls palettes from it, the DoP discusses contrast and light against it, and the colorist gets it delivered with the footage. A useful board is edited hard: twenty images that agree with each other beat two hundred that hedge.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• A moodboard sets atmosphere; a lookbook goes further into concrete styling, wardrobe and grade.
• Sort by scene or by element such as light, location, wardrobe — not by where you found the image.
• Film stills work, but a single movie as the only source invites a comparison you cannot win.

With TillyGen

In a TillyGen project the moodboard sits with the briefing — the reference point the storyboard frames get judged against.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.