The last week has been good. I took last weekend off, and went to the folk-life festival to hang out with my mother. This is the first break I’ve really allowed myself, and I think it was a good thing to do at that point, to clear my head of obsessing about my project, and give me a little bit of “perspective”. During the previous 8 days, I have also gone to see 3 movies at the Seattle International Film Festival, with Chloé and Brad. I saw Adams æbler, directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, a brilliantly deviant black comedy about events in your life changing you more than you change yourself; the new Quay Brothers movie The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, which is one of the most beautiful looking and organic feeling dreamlike explorations of thought-logic I have seen in quite some time; and the new movie directed by Jan Svankmajer, Lunacy, which rendered all of my previous and unexecuted plans of meat-animation obsolete in every way possible, and I mean that in the most admiration-filled way possible. “There is no freedom in a lunatic asylum”, and there is no escape from the confines of the plastic shrink-wrap we call skin, until death. It was very good for a non-art film.
As for my project, I have been making good progress in restructuring it over the time since last monday. I have taken everyone’s comments into consideration, as well as some excellent critique from Brad and Morgan, and in proper jed-fashion, have about 3,500 words of notes to myself consisting of thoughts and justifications for imagery and progression and cuts. Unfortunately, changing the location of a cut is not as simple as it would be in a standard non-linear video editor. For example, I changed the cutting around in the beggining when Barbie launches herself at Ken with her metal arm, seeking revenge. As everything regarding Barbie’s attack and Ken’s response were in different nested compositions, I had to move the nested footage inside of one composition over to the other in order to restructure the cut. Then, since the position/scale/other effects of the meat background is keyframed to match each cut in the composited Barbie foreground, I had to re-keyframe everything for each altered cut, in addition to synching these cuts with “synchresis” points in the musical soundtrack.
I am basically restructuring to get rid of the overly long shots of the children/blonde child spectating, and dispersing these throughout the intercutting and zoom-ins/outs of the writhing wire screens. I am also significantly altering the ending from the conceptually unjustified and stupid state that it was in for the rough cut. The transition to the “circuit-board land” will now happen in a way that better exemplifies their role as controllers/manipulators in the entire situation. After the wire “takes over” the baby barbie who just vomited, wire will take over the screen, keyed in chaotic wire, and writhing wire from the screens, multiplied and scaled down to form a sortof tunnel of recursive screens. The camera will “zoom” through this tunnel for a period of time, and then reveal the circuit board land. On each of the 3 screens above them, there will be the 3 main characters from the previous ‘narrative’, Ken, Barbie, and the Child barbie in the middle. Overlayed over each character will be the abstract imagery of the motion blur, altered, and synched to the soundtrack. Each time a bit of tinfoil flies between them, it will fly up and affect the screens.
After this happens, a flying zoom out through the same tunnel will occur, with flashing imagery of death and decay, as if these images are flying by. This will hopefully be a successful visual metaphor for the decay of society brought about as a result of the pervious situations, but we will see. After static flashes again, the image of the little clay man will be continued from where it left off at the begginning, and he will ‘return to the dirt‘, thus completing the allegory of the main narrative that is carried out in the introduction and ending.
I now return to work, for if I don’t, less of these ideas will come to fruition/realization.
News: There may just be a continuation of Carnivalé! The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes was shot on HD and processed with a plugin developed by the Foundry for the OpenFX API standard!
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The Last Week + New Title = Transference Simulation
The last week has been good. I took last weekend off, and went to the folk-life festival to hang out with my mother. This is the first break I’ve really allowed myself, and I think it was a good thing to do at that point, to clear my head of obsessing about my project, and give me a little bit of “perspective”. During the previous 8 days, I have also gone to see 3 movies at the Seattle International Film Festival, with Chloé and Brad. I saw Adams æbler, directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, a brilliantly deviant black comedy about events in your life changing you more than you change yourself; the new Quay Brothers movie The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, which is one of the most beautiful looking and organic feeling dreamlike explorations of thought-logic I have seen in quite some time; and the new movie directed by Jan Svankmajer, Lunacy, which rendered all of my previous and unexecuted plans of meat-animation obsolete in every way possible, and I mean that in the most admiration-filled way possible. “There is no freedom in a lunatic asylum”, and there is no escape from the confines of the plastic shrink-wrap we call skin, until death. It was very good for a non-art film.
As for my project, I have been making good progress in restructuring it over the time since last monday. I have taken everyone’s comments into consideration, as well as some excellent critique from Brad and Morgan, and in proper jed-fashion, have about 3,500 words of notes to myself consisting of thoughts and justifications for imagery and progression and cuts. Unfortunately, changing the location of a cut is not as simple as it would be in a standard non-linear video editor. For example, I changed the cutting around in the beggining when Barbie launches herself at Ken with her metal arm, seeking revenge. As everything regarding Barbie’s attack and Ken’s response were in different nested compositions, I had to move the nested footage inside of one composition over to the other in order to restructure the cut. Then, since the position/scale/other effects of the meat background is keyframed to match each cut in the composited Barbie foreground, I had to re-keyframe everything for each altered cut, in addition to synching these cuts with “synchresis” points in the musical soundtrack.
I am basically restructuring to get rid of the overly long shots of the children/blonde child spectating, and dispersing these throughout the intercutting and zoom-ins/outs of the writhing wire screens. I am also significantly altering the ending from the conceptually unjustified and stupid state that it was in for the rough cut. The transition to the “circuit-board land” will now happen in a way that better exemplifies their role as controllers/manipulators in the entire situation. After the wire “takes over” the baby barbie who just vomited, wire will take over the screen, keyed in chaotic wire, and writhing wire from the screens, multiplied and scaled down to form a sortof tunnel of recursive screens. The camera will “zoom” through this tunnel for a period of time, and then reveal the circuit board land. On each of the 3 screens above them, there will be the 3 main characters from the previous ‘narrative’, Ken, Barbie, and the Child barbie in the middle. Overlayed over each character will be the abstract imagery of the motion blur, altered, and synched to the soundtrack. Each time a bit of tinfoil flies between them, it will fly up and affect the screens.
After this happens, a flying zoom out through the same tunnel will occur, with flashing imagery of death and decay, as if these images are flying by. This will hopefully be a successful visual metaphor for the decay of society brought about as a result of the pervious situations, but we will see. After static flashes again, the image of the little clay man will be continued from where it left off at the begginning, and he will ‘return to the dirt‘, thus completing the allegory of the main narrative that is carried out in the introduction and ending.
I now return to work, for if I don’t, less of these ideas will come to fruition/realization.
News: There may just be a continuation of Carnivalé! The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes was shot on HD and processed with a plugin developed by the Foundry for the OpenFX API standard!