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.
No comments:
Post a Comment