Meeting with Dan

Today I met with Dan. I was telling him that I shoot the way I write. I usually condense things and tend not to like a lot of elaboration or business. At the beginning of Disney's Pinnochio, Jiminy Cricket stands there on the fireplace fiddling around with this or that for what seems like five full minutes. It drives me nuts.

The problem is, at some point, a film needs to have business, or animation, or movement, or elaboration or detail. Call it what you want. In our effort, everything is straight to the point and stripped to the bone. But that doesn't always work dramatically. You have to have something like the cat jumping out at you, the false alarm. Or the voltometer needle jumping up and down. Or the lights flickering on and off. Or the security guard walking by the door. Or the kid going back for the dog. You need to build suspense over time. Otherwise your suspenseful scene is just a camera pushing in and that's it.

There are two problems here. One is elaborating the suspense without puncturing it. The other is thinking of -good- business--something that's not too stereotypical, something that adds to the story rather than just being used for effect.

The timing is also a bit difficult. So Dan agreed to make some temp audio for the suspenseful scenes. We need to have time enough to let the scene build. He can determine what 'enough time' is and I'll edit/shoot around that.

I was also telling Dan about how I want to change the church scene. You remember the church scene--Ben reading an arcane books, the birds attack, etc. etc. Every time I look at the footage I dislike it more and more. It's the scene that I feel is too contrived. If we could have found a better location I think it would have worked. But every time I see it, it just doesn't hang together visually. It's mostly the location. A Protestant church just can't look like a Catholic church.

So I've been thinking about shooting in our slide library at school. The slide library at school is really interesting. It has these huge metal drawers with vertically mounted built in light boxes You pull out a sheet of slides and you can see dozens of them at the same time, like a backlight mosaic or stained glass window. In that way, it's the same idea as the church, only more visually unique. Since I can't get the kind of church I want, I figure I should go the other way and take the scene in a more sterile, mechanical direction.

Oh yeah, the score. Dan showed me the original score for the Codex intercut audio. It is literally a score. On huge composer's music paper, Dan has the entire thing written out in notes. It's an amazing thing to see. But Dan's not using the score anymore. That was for when he was thinking of the audio as "art"--something in which the artist's hand was evident. Now that he's reconceptualized the sound as something that ought to be mimetic and less art-like, he's doing part of the first intercut in Performer to give it a more hand made feel.