Napoleon Dynamite/dir. Jared Hess/2004 |
Gentleman Broncos/dir. Jared Hess/2009 |
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Kimya Dawson |
Jeffrey Lewis |
To kickstart the beautifully named 'Other' section, I have a piece of instalment art which I had discovered while working on the presentation named Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez (please note my *insert final letter of the alphabet* is broken and therefore me and Felix are going to be on first name basis for this section). This piece is 79kg of sweets pilled into the corner of a room which the patrons were asked to take a piece at a time. At first, it seems simple but then you find out that it is actually dedicated to Felix's partner, Ross. Ross was diagnosed with AIDS and the 79kg represents Ross' weight when he was initially diagnosed. The act of the taking the sweets represents the impact AIDS had on Ross' body. Even though it's a very solemn piece, it is an interesting interpretation of life and subsequent death. Even though it doesn't have a direct impact on my work, it was the foundation to make think of death and interpret it in my own way. |
The reasoning behind why this poem is here is probably less obvious most likely. A poem is neither a visual or audio medium. Due to this, like a person reading braille, I am going to have go off feeling.
The Two-Headed Calf is a beautiful poem by Laura Gilpan. I interpreted the poem as something that embodies innocence and personal interpretation of life due to experiences (or in this calfs case, lack of life experience). The final line is the best thing about the whole piece. This fits into my own work as it made me think of how the experience of someone's life can influence their viewpoint on topics. Even though I don't go into the past of my two main characters, I feel you can learn that side of them by seeing the difference on how the react to the idea of death. This difference is also important so that the audience view Mat and Brian as two individuals rather then a person copy and pasted. |
With this poem, I would like to put the first verse under the microscope as that's what I mainly focused on. I find this poem a really interesting insight on life. By stating 'Do not go gentle into that good night' it's calling the audience to not just embrace death but fight against it. Put the focus on life itself rather than life coming to it's end. Not only is it inspiring for this film but life in general. Who knew you were going to get a life lesson on the same project where I named an idea 'Alien't'? This poem is relevant to my project as it sums up what I am trying to convey with my characters (especially Mat). I want Mat's outlook on life to start shifting to what this poem embodies. He starts off with too much focus on life coming to its end and you can see how that is effecting him. To get better mentally he needs to start finding enjoyment in life. That might be putting it too simply but hopefully you get what I mean. |
Refence List (Page 11)
For this page I do not mean an actual reference list in which I keep note of all my sources, like you do at the end of an essay. This page was just a way of helping me remember direct references in the film. These are visual/audio references I decided to put into my film. Below is the source material for all the entries I put on this page. Some of them are obscure for no other reason than it just happened to be what I was thinking/listening to as I was writing the script. |
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Liv has a certain way of going through the script and highlighting each shot type in their own respective colour. This is a very visual way of seeing the variety of shots you are going to be getting for your project. Even though I have said before about wanting more focus on the wider angle shots, you still want some form of balance with close ups. This will make the wider shots feel more poignant as you have a contrast to compare with. After going through the process of annotating the whole script, I had started to feel that the whole thing was starting to come together. I had started writing the script for this film in the summer before I had started this final year of uni so it feels like it's been through a long process. As I now have in writing what it's going to look like, everything is becoming more real. |
Above, a small sketch for page 11 of the script.
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From here we started doing a bit of research into this song to try and make some contact about getting permission for it. We found out that Doktor Kosmos was a 90's socialist Swedish band fronted by a man called Uje Brandelius (Mr Brandelius' stage name is also Doktor Kosmos). So after this we had looked into this man in particular. A Swedish band from the 90's seems quite far removed from little ol' Weston Super Mare.
Move forward in time to after one search of 'Uje Brandelius' and we found out that he had a Facebook profile. It was a long shot and I remember my tutor saying that if he responds with something along the lines of 'contact my label' it was probably going to be too hard to follow through with. Well after roughly an hour of the initial message being sent out, we had received a reply. We had got given the go-ahead! I guess there is now the additional pressure of the fact I have to send the final film to him but I welcome it. So that's how I ended up reaching out to a man about a song. I have linked the conversation between my tutor and Mr. Brandelius to the left. |
The next display of me trying to balance my set was that even though the footage from Liv's film had been removed off the CFast cards and stored elsewhere, they were somehow taking up storage on the cards. I hadn't seen something like this before as it wasn't like we could even play that footage either, it was like they were haunting the device. The problem was that the option to format the card was out the window as there was a quarter of footage from what we had already done on this day. This meant we had to go through and manually remove each of these ghosts files. As I felt that this was going to take a long time, I decided that I would call for lunch. This meant me and Liv could go off and fix the problem while everyone else was eating. I thought this was a smart move by me as I didn't want people waiting around and it gave an opportunity for everyone to socialise a bit more. Even though it wasn't a difficult problem to overcome it sure was a tedious one. But also this can be learning experience for me for future projects. Always make sure to check the cards on the camera, rather than just the computer.
The one thing I had realised as the day went on was that on as we filmed was the weather. It might not have rained but it had remained consistently overcast all through the day. As my plan was to get all of the filming done for the field on this first day and then we could get all the scenes in the forest done on the 30th. I brought up the issue with the weather as as the sky was overcast, there was no real sense that we were getting later in the day. Not in a 'oh damn, my sundial is can't work right now' sense but more like 'this film's story takes place all on the same day and if there is no sun to suggest it's getting later in the day, that might be an issue' sense. |