Guillermo Del Toro speaking about the notebooks he kept that became his film, “Pan’s Labyrinth”

Many artists talk about keeping a notebook as a place to start gathering ideas. Even if they’re not sure about what the project is, they begin to gather things into their notebook that have a certain magnetic quality, that somehow feel related to this future project. Think of a notebook as a place to start letting bits and pieces and scraps of images accumulate until something starts to take on some kind of a shape, almost on its own. Something like a dust ball galaxy begins to roll, something that could not have been predicted

Notebooks are a good staging area for this kind of accumulation of images and ideas.