Update 6/25/05

Hello everyone,

Dan came over this week to look at the sets in progress and discuss the audiotrack further. Even though the workshop set was done, I've been playing with it a lot. I keep getting ideas for how this thing should look.

Process:

I was looking at the movie Dark City. There's a scene where the crazy guy has written all over the walls of a room. But when I watched the scene, I just didn't believe it. It just felt like the production designer created the room and then they just dropped the actor in it and said, 'pretend like you're drawing.' The typical film production process is so stratified that there often isn't an opportunity for elements and ideas to mingle. I'm speculating that when Dan comes up with his preliminary ideas for the score, these ideas might somehow ripple through the entire production in a way that's different from the typical process in which scoring is done after the picture is locked. This might not even be on a conscious level. At any rate, I think I mentioned this, but I'm really liking have longitudinal time to work through everything. I think it's making everything richer and more thoughtful.

Notes on rough workshop set image below: I colorized the door red to see what it looks like. I'll probably take the leftover paint from the red room and paint the door red. It looks nicer. I photoshopped in a window to see what it looks like. I like it so far. The window interior will be green screen and will allow me with a natural way to do the projections (like the clouds). Everything else is unretouched. You can see how sharp the video camera shoots in frame mode. This is taken directly from one frame of video.I've been working on the workshop set to make it look more theatrical. The first thing I did was to pull the camera back. Starting with a wide shot automatically makes the thing look more theatrical since that's all you have in theater. There's also a kind of flatness that I like in modern theater. Pulling back is making me deal with scale in a different way. The perpetual motion machine was built to function primarily in a small scale set. When the camera is wide, there needs to be some bigger elements to the machine so I'm working on that.




THeater and performance

I'm also thinking of theatricality as a kind of objectification of performance. I'm just putting in this ideas a note to myself for later. Ben, whatever you're doing in the previs looks great. I guess the idea is that Ben is simply just being himself in all the scenes, being 'normal' and everything around him looks slightly theatrical. I'm not sure where all this 'theatrical' interest comes from.

Graveyard-shrine

In the graveyard scene, Ben finds a tombstone or other item and sees the spinner symbol and the words 'ex nihilo.' I wanted to make this a little more visual. I'm thinking of him going to a roadside shrine instead. Very similar idea, but more flexible visually. This way, he can tear through layers of photos and images in the shrine to get to the symbol. And it's actually more visually interesting to look at this rather than just a plaque in the ground. (see jpg for sample shrine)



Films I've been looking at related to the video....

Pi--About a conspiracy. Visual and more of Darren Aronofsky's shallow profundity.

Conspiracy Theory. Mel Gibson thinks everything is a conspiracy. I looked at his room which has all sorts of things hanging in it. They went for realism. Not that useful.

Dark CIty (See earlier in email).

Cat woman. There's a scene where Halle Berry is looking through the internet doing research. Similar to Ben looking at arcane book pages in the church. But the Pitof-directed scene is self-consciously stylish.

Daredevil-the end is like the original ending of the video where Ben erased the word processed file. A weird ending.

A Beautiful Mind. My niece's boyfriend saw the red room pages hanging in my room and said it reminded him of this movie. I can see why. I never made the connection before. Ron Howard does it rather awkwardly I thought, but I guess it gets the job done. I hated Russell Crowe's acting. I thought it was annoying and mannered.

Update 6/15/05

Hello,

I just realized I feel like I'm writing an email blog.

This past week has been productive. The spinner works! It was difficult. The invisible thread arrived. I was disappointed because it looked thick and furry. Then I realized that you're supposed to unravel the thread and use the individual tiny threads. Yes they are invisible. You cannot see the thread even from inches way. The thread is brittle and is extremely hard to use.

Half the time I have to take it by faith that i'm actually holding the thread. It was so tough to work with that I went to Joannes and bought a spool of "invisible thread" to use as a replacement. It's like thin dark fish line, but it still shows up on video! It would have been OK if it didn't move, but the movement is a dead giveaway. So I summoned up my courage, went back to the magician's invisible thread and got it to work. By the way, if you ever need some, just go to a store and pick up "wooly nylon." After ordering it from Penguin Magic, I found it's the basically the same thing. I give credit to the magicians who use it. In fact, it's more magical to me that they can control the invisible thread without breaking it than doing the actual levitation itself.

At any rate, the workshop set is finally complete. Ready for shooting.

Krissy and I painted the two rooms. The green room ended up being a grayish blue. The red room was difficult to paint. Halfway through, I found out I was supposed to prime the wall.I didn't which is why I had to use so many coats. Anyway, the red is quite beautiful, the paint job is lousy, but we concentrated on the part that will be seen. (The rest of the room will only be seen when the camera flies around Ben).

The gray/blue room should be easy to dress. The red room will be somewhat harder. I've been making a collage on my closet door of various papers. I got a lot of great stuff from collage supply outlets (eg. mantofev.com). I also have some vintage mcdonalds and cake ads arriving via the mail (Ebay). The hard thing about this is the scale--filling up the space with energy.

___

I am so far really liking this way of making the film. It's slow and drawn out and the line between pre/post/production is also blurred. So I've been able to think through things. There's a kind of understanding that comes only from longitudinal time I believe.

Some things I've been thinking about:

>Firmed up the introductory scene. This was not previsualized. It was the scene that was going to show closeups of the spinner and Ben's physics books. I realized there needs to be a magical momenet where we are very tight. Ben releases the spinner into the air and then it starts spinning/floating. Cue the spinner music. There is lots of detail in the workshop set so closeups should look nice.

> I realized that the driving scene from the graveyard to the church/lilbrary is not necessary. I'm not sure why I put it there in the first place, but I realize that it's important for the church to be geographically and chronologically ambiguous. maybe it's actually in Europe. Who knows? But there needs to be ambiguity.

>Ben and his wife-originally still images. Should probably be more like home videos. Since moving away from the changing-photos machine idea, we might as well go full motion. It will add a nice and different visual texture.

>I got the Russian Vostok model, which is quite beautiful. It was going to be the satellite in the ending scene. I'm now wondering if It's better not to show the satellite at all?? Remember, we want to keep it ambiguous as to whether Ben is really being pursued or whether this is all his vain imagining.

That's it for now.

I believe Dan is back from Stuttgart where he was doing a MAX sound program for a dance group there.

Ron

Update 6/9/05

Hi everyone,

Here's what's happening with the video...

Notes:

Garage: the set where Ben is developing the spinner
Green room: the set that represents Ben's workplace
Red room: used for the finale in which Ben is reading his notes off the wall.

The garage set is 99% complete. Last thing I'm working on is making the spinner spin. I tested black thread and it shows very clearly on video...there's even a shadow. So I ordered some invisible thread from a magic store to see if that works better. I found that the higher the spinner, the better it looks. If it's too low like in the previs, it doesn't look like it's floating.

I'm working now on the wall of papers and writing for the red room. I'm probably nixing the plexiglass idea. What I'm doing now looks a lot more organic and visually richer. hmmm. probably only an academic would find a "reading off a wall" scene climactic.

In July, I'm pretty sure we can shoot the garage, green room and red room. That will be 80% of the "1st unit" footage.

Dan, I was wondering if Olivia might be interested in being in the video in still form. I envision her doing a time period thing, like a 100 year old photograph with her holding the spinner. Like an old portrait. That would be taped.

The lights came in. I ran lighting tests and am very happy with the image. I'm most likely shooting progressive scan in simulated 16 x 9 mode.

I found a fantastic church exterior in Glendale. It looks like some kind of monastery. Still need to find a library interior.

Ron