Version 14 & stunt spinner

Stunt spinner version 1.0

I'm now on version 14 of the treatment and I think I have the entire thing figured out. Yes, we've heard that before. I've designed the desert clue. I moved the bird scene to the workroom and added rain. I think I have the visuals for the codex audio worked out. The desert clue leaps out at Ben as it needs to. The bird scene moves straight into the desert scene while adding in elements of the supernatural. It prefigures the pop culture clue-building as it's supposed to do. I nixed the church AND the library.

The more I watch the first quasi-assemble, the odder this thing screens. If you look at a particular section it really looks like a typical movie. Makes sense--I've been using mainstream films as a guide for sometime now. Seen as a whole, however, the project might come across as an incoherent mainstream film. Not sure. There's this weird tightrope I'm trying to walk where we're using a typical cinema vocabulary but using audio and the connective tissues in such a way that the thing looks like it makes sense but you're not really sure how.

The other week we were in a rush to get the stunt spinner done. When looking at the footage I realized that it wasn't wrecked enough and the rushing showed. So this past weekend, I really bent the metal off center to make the spinner look more obviously thrashed. In this sequence, we need to understand instantly that the spinner is fried. Also I was putting the spinner down for storage and caught a look at it in the sunlight. It was really nice. I put all this gloss finish on the spinner to make it look like heat-hardened ceramic coating. That contrasted nicely with Ben's torch job. I need to light the thing better. Over the weekend I was also able to sand off some of the obvious brushstrokes that were annoying me. It just looks better now. Of all the props, I thought this one would be easy because it just had to look thrashed. But I've discovered that at least for me, doing the beaten-up wear-and-tear stuff is actually a lot harder than making the newer-looking stuff. It's so easy for the props to get too self-conscious looking or overly-arty or overly manipulated and finicky.