I like 'em big, deep and still

I guess whether I'm in Hawaii or LA, I'm always thinking about the same things. Maybe that's why I'm not that interested in traveling. Siwaraya says that except for school I never leave Pasadena.

Those of you following this production diary know that one of the purposes of this project is to think through what it means for people with traditional art/design backgrounds to create narrative film.

The first approach is animation which is the marriage of drawing and film.

A second approach would be to use abstract mechanical/ expressionistic approaches within a film. This can be done diegetically and non-diegetically. The perfect example of the diegetic approach is Stealth. The plane is flying. Cut to the video display where we see some motion graphics. Then we cut to a wide shot of the plane as a (virtual) shaky, hand-held camera attempts to keep the plane in frame. The second approach is non-diegetic. This is what the students usually like to do. Burns to white. Highly effected flashback sequences. You know, like Underworld: Evolution. Stuff that looks cool that draws from a spatially-oriented visual arts vocabulary.

A third approach would be a combination of the "USC Cinema style," traditional animation and abstract film that George Lucas uses for Star Wars. If you're interested in what I call the "USC Cinema" style, see two excellent resources: Innocence of the Eye by Ed Spiegel and The Visual Story by Bruce Block. These books derive from post-Eisenstein(ian) formalism as channeled through Slavko Vorkapich and the USC film department.

I seem to be using a fourth approach, one that backgrounds abstraction. In this case, artifacts become a means of disclosing thought/communication. As I wrote in an earlier post, our film seems to be about one person, but I think of it as a fight between Ben and an unseen adversary. The objects visualize a series of escalating confrontations, points in which two worlds meet.

Visually, here's how the film is turning out (see post on Thinking about terminology for some definitions)--

>Big (when possible)
>Deep (e.g. non-flat)
>Still (e.g., Theatrical)
>Spectacle through energy without expense
>Inexpensive but not cheap
>Directed from the editing room
>Craft coming into being