The Road To Magnasanti from JOHNS MOVIES on Vimeo. |
Left - 'Road to Mangnasanti' by John Wilson (2017) Bottom - Trailer for 'How To with John Wilson' Season 2 by John Wilson (2022) |
As you can see from the image on the right (top), I have screenshotted from his website, the pictures seem to have this feeling like they’ve been stuck in hurriedly. This would make sense for this particular exhibit as it is title ‘my potograps’. I can assume this is to give the idea that you are looking through a scrapbook of the photos he’s taken of friends and family in a rudimentary style. If I were to go in and try and find anything, I would have to know exactly what I’m looking for. This creates a sense of exploration throughout his work. All you are given is a small square picture of something from each piece and a name. The names are always very literal in what you are about to see. While working on this project, I had gone through his website once more and had found the title ‘DANCE with security guy’. I saw that and expected some form of collection of photos about the theme of challenging the law. ‘Dance’ potentially meaning fight in some contexts. ‘security guy’ could mean the law in a metaphorical sense. I was very wrong on both parts here. The link actually takes you to a single picture of Mr Gravlejs literally dancing with a security guard at a contemporary art festival in Riga, Latvia. Nothing else. Hopefully, you can see what I mean when I’m talking about the abstractness of his decisions to present his work. I still have no idea if that picture is/was shown in a real-life exhibition of his or if it was just a picture he had liked of himself. I think a person can do so much more than just stick their work online without any thought. Gravlejs shows that you can make the medium in which you show work as unique as you like. |
Two frames from Finding Graceland.
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Finding Graceland is about two friends that go camping. One of the friends is having an existential crisis while the other is an Elvis impersonator for the elderly (they can’t tell the difference). I think the very first connection I can already make between my work and how I am presenting myself is the change in name I had talked about in the previous paragraph. Having the less formal name of ‘Charlie Philms’ associated with Finding Graceland makes a lot of sense to me. Philms is almost the play on the word Phil and films. It is therefore an unnecessary way of spelling it. However, in the moment it was kind of funny to me and that is why I ultimately decided to choose that way of spelling it. Finding Graceland is full of stuff that might not have merit to a lot of people, but I chose to have it in the film as I found it amusing myself. I think the idea of doing something in my more story driven films just because I thought it would be good for me to see rather than putting too much onus on if the audience will like it is most likely going to be my mantra when I am in the writing stage in the future. I look at the works of Taika Waititi who I personally feel like tackles certain subjects in the way I want my own films to do so, as inspiration. Going forward with my work, I would want to continue this identity within my work. I want the way I present this work to be reflected in how I show it to the public as well.
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A good place to work all this out is by looking at what ‘experiences’ I had gone through to make Finding Graceland. Given the context, when I say experience, I actually mean what had inspired me. Luckily for me, the whole process that I went through was documented by me. I had even a dedicated ‘Inspirations’ section within my workbook for that project. From this section, I have taken two screengrabs from to give you some sort of idea of what I was looking at. You are able to see on the right, that the common denominator between these films was that they were released in the 21st century and both aimed at the demographic of young adult. My first example, Paddleton was a Netflix original which I would argue was directed at this younger audience as this audience is more likely to consume media through streaming platforms compared to going to the cinema. I believe this as my generation (1999-2000) were the generation which revolutionised the act of ‘binge-watching’. Streaming sites such as Netflix were huge enablers of this. This is the main reason as to why I believe that Paddleton was aimed at the demographic that I am a part of.
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For this project, I will be obviously looking at how I present my own work. Gone are the days of giving someone your business card and hoping they contact you at some point. To quote Dewey Wilkerson ‘The future is now, old man’. This means that I will be looking at how I present myself, as a filmmaker, in two different aspects. The first way that I’ll be looking into being the more traditional way of showing any form of work off. This is in person or ‘in real life.’ I will be talking about all the possibilities I have to show Finding Graceland off to people face to face. This can be the conventional route of hosting viewings of my film for the public or submitting it film festivals. Either option offers their own benefits which I will indulge whoever is reading this in them benefits soon. The less conventional route that I can go down when showing my work off in ways which could be described as more out-there.
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The Bristol Independent Film Festival is very lofty goals to be a part of. It is a festival that is in its sixth year and is already widely known. Of course to just to submit a film to the competition without knowing anything about it would probably be described as not the smartest. On the profile page for the BIFF, they have a section where they talk about specific categories that you are able to enter. As you can see on the right, there are many categories in which I could enter. The one I would submit to would obviously be ‘Student Film’. It’s £11 to enter but that is a small price to pay from what you mioght be able to get out of it. You can see that there are such a variety of other catagories to enter, that the people that will be in attendance will also be equally varied. I talked about it earlier that film festivals are one of the best ways to make new connections. I feel that trying to find any success with the BIFF would definitely be the way to go. |
I did make an actual post, where I talked a bit about Finding Graceland. But again, it was more of a celebration that I actually had made the film and I wanted to congratulated everyone that was involved in the process of making Finding Graceland. If people were actually interested in watching the film then they can contact me for a link. I did think that this is too much effort for someone to go through just to watch a film. It made me start to think about how I can make it easier for someone to watch it. As you can see on the left here, it would’ve been smart to add a link that would allow anyone that did see the instagram post be able to watch it. However, this is just something I am going to have to think about for next time. I think it would be smart of me to make a website in the future. This would act as a great hub for all the projects that I am or haven't worked out. At the current time, I haven’t actually made a website as I had run out of time. However, if you were to go back to the research section of this project, you can see that I have looked at people who are already in the industries website. From there, I would use them as guidance on how I would make my own website. |