More comics, finessing vfx and Brazil

Finally got my copy of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3, the one with the comic book version of Larry Niven's short story Not Long Before the End. I suspect this story is one of the distant influences of the spinner. I would have been an impressionable high schooler back then.

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I'm beginning to think that one of the best uses of fx lies in finessing images like an artist. How do you create a shadow that is ambiguously an entity, a person, or just a shadow? With fx, you can tweak away, adding performance and story value to these kinds of images. If you're just shooting it, it's tough to get exactly the right image and tone.

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When I was trying to describe the portable Memex to Ben he said, "Oh, like Brazil." So I've been watching that. Here's another film I actually saw in a theater. What's interesting is that it looks SO eighties. When I was watching it in the eighties, I thought as we all did that the film had an eclectic retro-deco mid-century look. The eighties vibe was totally invisible.

In retrospect the eighties influence is unmistakable. I never realized it before but what we think of as an eighties sensibility is really the last vestiges of disco.... neon, mirror tiles, airbrush art, lighted glass, flat unmodulated spaces, the beginnings of hi tech. Think Xanadu (1980). Then the eighties took on an identity of its own—homogenized New Wave, pastels... curiously, the phone jacks in Brazil are pastel colors. I wonder if they sold them like that back then or whether the production actually bothered to paint them. Then there's Jonathon Pryce's dream sequence makeup which looks like something straight out of an Adam Ant music video.

Watching Brazil emphasized the fact that no matter how hard you try to be timeless, you're still stuck in your era. One of the reasons I've been taking that mid-century production design approach for our film is that I didn't want it to become dated too quickly. It's something I used to see a lot in student work. Students would represent technology and the future with CDs and computers and microchips and of course it all looked dated by the end of the semester. Yet no matter what we do with our film, it's going to age in a certain way... in twenty years, I'm sure it will look "SO new millenium."


From the same comic book... the origins of the crystalline stars?

Where we are, PI book of ants, final expositions

Rewrote the treatment with the VO text, revised bird scene and a short, easy transition scene. I like the VO a lot. It makes things easier and smoother. I feel right at home pounding it out. The film is a funny beast. There's a standard dramatic structure underneath it all. But it's a little opaque. You know something is happening and that it makes sense, but you can't follow it in the normal sense of following a movie. The protagonist's motives are unclear. He doesn't really have any. I like that aspect of it. That's the kind of character I wanted to write. He doesn't "want" or "need" anything in the traditional film sense of the word. He is equally passive as he is active. He sort of flows from scene to scene. At the same time, there is some underlying dramatic momentum. I was thinking the other day that you have to split paragraphs. In other words, rather than writing in the traditional "topic sentence/one idea" way, you have to split each scene so it starts in the middle of a paragaph and ends in the middle of the next. So every scene is ending with some sort of cliffhanger. Curiously I was looking at a book at Border's yesterday that had the same strategy diagrammed out. I think it's called Writing for Animation.

Here's a summary of where we are...

Drama... I like having a dramatic structure under there, a sense of momentum, the call/response structure we developed

Voice Over... In traditional terms, VO is bad because it narrates--tells instead of shows. I like using it to help define the structure. It just seems natural to me.

Motivations/purpose... I like the ambiguity of the character's needs and desires. It seems like a big part of what makes this interesting to me is the ability to define a character in this way... the character doesn't have a backstory or a history or quirks or embellishments. He just more or less exists.

Sequence.... I like the way the events are structured. To me it's truthful and makes sense. Ben's responses and actions make sense. But it's not always dramatically apparent what's going on. I guess I don't think it matters.

Gadgets and techniques... What I don't like I realize is when gadgets are used as a formula to achieve a (usually emotional) result. Like here's the sad music so you feel sad. It's more of a direction thing than a writing thing.

FX...I suspect that one of the reasons why Hollywood films have in-your-face effects is because the effect has to work. It has to register. If your effect is overly subtle then the point doesn't come across. When money is on the line you have to make your point. I realize that I try to direct things like a visual artist. So I'm thinking... in this scene, we can barely see the bird, more like a shadow of the bird. What is it? Is it a bird? I spend all my time finessing this kind of stuff. The performance is in these visual details and not so much in the "acting." This kind of approach virtually demands the iterative methodology we're using. You can't do this in a major feature because of the way they're put together. Those films are designed around the performers and the events.

Stripping down/building up...I just watched the previs again. It's cut down so much that it seems to go too fast. So now we can put in some nice long shots... images to give the viewers time to digest... images to stretch out the feeling of time. It is a good feeling to think that everything is stripped down to the point where we can start fleshing it out.

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PI

I think the film has a kind of PI vibe... voice over, conspiracy, weird machines. I'm amazed no one told me, "You have to watch it!" Did you know there's a comic book version of the movie? It looks like a Chic comic. You can see some pages here. It's interesting because I was thinking of making a comic book too (albeit a super-abstract one). Interestingly, I didn't really like PI all that much. If you were thinking of getting PI: the Guerilla Diaries, don't unless you're a super-fan. It's mostly a bunch of notes.

The Illusionist

You recall I'm always a little embarassed by the way our film depends so heavily on the final exposition. So I'm making a collection of over-the-top final expositions to make myself feel better. The Illusionist scores a top spot here along with Sleepy Hollow. I wonder how Neil Burger directed Paul Giamatti in that scene? What exactly do you tell someone to do? Think.... remember... now think again, but this time remembering...

"That's pretty good for all that crap"

Went to C&H today to look for parts for the portable Memex. There's still a lot there and they're still getting stuff from the warehouse. But the shelves are getting bare. Go while you can. Everything is half off! I bought a bag of components and dials for $13.65 leading to the comment from the cashier that titles this post.

I also realized I messed up on the postcard clue (rough version above). Originally this clue was going to be pieced together from menus and cereal boxes and odd stuff lying around the house. Then I thought turning the clue into a postcard would streamline it. Now, I'm realizing that in order for the red room to work, the desert clue has to be pieced together from stuff. It's the beginning of his clue-building madness.

I must have the most profoundly inefficient way of working. It comes from always be willing to test the basic assumptions. If I make one change, I let it ripple into the foundations of the project to see what happens. It's not very scientific. It's more like being willing to be stupid and forgetful. I think I have a good new solution to a problem (like the postcard). So I set it into motion. I live with it awhile. And then I find it doesn't work. So I have to go back to the original or on to something new. But then I have some greater understanding or conviction about why I'm doing something.

When in doubt make props

One thing I really believe is that true "playing around" usually ends up being productive. A couple of years ago, when Maria was in and out of the hospital I built some circuit-bent instruments to take a breather from things. What I learned from that activity evolved into prop design. Here's an initial layout of what the portable Memex device might look like. The screen is surplus from C & H. The keys are scrapbooking decoration from Michael's. I have big clunkier, typewriter-looking ones but I'm having a hard time making them fit.

v. 5 structure & voice overs

In my other life which intersects with my filmmaking life I've been writing Photoshop tutorials for class. In a composition, if you get the underlying structure, you can make pretty much anything work (see previous post). Also been thinking about the voice over I added. It's really not bad considering I wrote it this morning in about 20 minutes. It reminds me a lot of Sin City and La Jette. Interestingly, both of these time-based pieces have their origins in the 2D world—Sin City as the Frank Miller graphic novel and La Jette as the product of photographer Chris Marker. Why would 2D people find it natural to think in terms of voice overs? I don't think it's a coincidence, but I'm not sure why I believe that. In terms of structure, I put the two long VOs over the montages. Over the "real time" scenes, there are just a few words of VO. I like David Mamet's idea that in film, there should just be the lightest dusting of dialogue. Although to me, there seems to be nothing talkier than a David Mamet film.

v. 5 Ben & Erik see the previz

Created a hasty previs this morning. I got rid of the library and integrated the research scene into the desert using the portable Memex device. I also added a voice over. It's amazing how much more sense it makes now with the narration. Duh. I guess that's why people use it to fix movies gone wrong. Plus, it's really similar to what I was doing in grad school—first person narratives. What I'm after now is shrinking this thing down to the bare bones. Make it work as a dramatic structure. Then I can mess it up and add weird stuff as needed. Already, it's down to 7 minutes from 12. Now that I can see the structure, it's helping me to articulate my goals for the project. The dramatic structure is OK. Devices and emotion-bludgeoning techniques and embellishements are not. I'm also seeing where the film lags for the first time. I'm realizing that you have to have mini goals, you can't just put in filler. Duh. So Ben walking through the desert as it stands is a little boring. He needs to encounter some clues or obstacles, or something to tell him he's on the right track. It's the mark of Arne Saknussemm! (OK, I just put Journey to the Center of the Earth-James Mason/Pat Boone version in my Netflix queue.)

I'm thinking that my approach to this is exactly like my students'. You start by working from the outside in. You start with the superficial and then eventually encounter the need for underlying structure. It's like making a design. If you have the basic composition figured out, you can add all kinds of textures and other things if you want—not to decorate the piece, but to make it richer.

Showed this version to Ben, Erik and Gene. They were generally favorable. Gene's only comment was that the address #s in one shot are so prominent that they seem to mean something. I told Ben that his Memex device would look like a portable Enigma machine, so that's why the image at the top of this post.

Also, last night Carlo emailed me think link. It's a music video with a bird attack scene! But it's more like a paranoid-delusional bird attack scene with the guy miming fighting the birds which are superimposed. It helped me to realize that in our film, I'm trying to keep the visuals mundane. The machines and situation are fantastic so the presentation needs to be grounded.

v. 5—The da Vinci Code + North By Northwest + Memex + The Birds

The various versions of the troublesome bird scene so far....

v1. Church (partially shot)
v2. Slide Library
v3. Laundry room (partially shot)
v4. Laundry room second try

This is the scene when Ben does some research, finds a little about the meaning "ex nihilo" and is scared off by an unnatural bird event. Here's potential version 5. If anything, documenting how I try to solve this cinematic problem shows my creative process. Watch things. Rip them off. Believe that what I come up with is going to work. If it doesn't, repeat process. I think this is the sum of my artistic ability.

In The da Vinci Code book, there is a scene where Robert Langdon drops in a library to do some important research while on the run. If I remember correctly, this scene was changed in the film: Langdon borrows someone's internet device in a bus. This makes the scene more cinematic by keeping everything moving—literally because they're on a bus, and dramatically because they can cut out the boring librarian searching stuff.

I think something like this could work. We could actually get rid of the entire Laundry room scene. Let's say Ben is still in the desert. He finds the shrine. Now he's driving away from it and he's looking at his portable internet device. In keeping with the gadgets in the movie, it's a clunky thing like a portable version of Vannevar Bush's memex (see image above). He's driving and doing his research. Scary pictures. Then all of a sudden, whoomph, an attack from the sky.

In this version, the device takes the place of Rod Taylor in the birds. Ben is really paying attention to this device like Tippi Hedrin pays attention to Taylor. Putting the scene out in the desert makes Ben more vulnerable. Like the famous biplane sequence in North by Northwest. With Ben mobile and driving, it keeps the story moving. And he can dramatically turn off the road when attacked... everything bumpy and handheld. Visually the idea is that the view through the windows is going to be blown out so that anything coming at the truck is going to be hazy at best. This is a natural look that makes sense for the desert.

Of course, keep in mind that the equivalent scene in the da Vinci Code triggered Tom Hanks' memorable and often-mocked line, "Ive got to get to a library—fast!"

v. 4—Nooooooo...... The Birds boat attack

Everyone knows the worst part of Episode III—the part where Darth Vader goes "Noooooo....!" This egregious use of a cinematic cliche only makes sense if you understand George Lucas' thinking. Coming from that modernist abstract-film-as-visual-music mentality, Lucas thinks of his films as musical structures. And as musical structures, there are repeats and refrains. So the "Nooooo...." in Ep. III echoes the "Nooooo...." in the other films (I forget where they were... wasn't there one in Episode V?)

Coming from a similar abstract visual mentality I find myself unconsciously thinking about our film in the same way. There are three discreet sections in the film. Each has repeating pattern—Ben makes a statement, the statement is heard/observed, the statement is answered with an aggressive response. Each of these statements occurs in a scene...

Statement 1: The workshop : Ben views crystals; the 'invisible hand' breaks the spinner
Statement 2: The laundry room : Ben pursues research about the spinner; a "warning shot" is fired
Statement 3: The red room : Ben decodes the message; the death sentence is triggered

The problem I've been writing about every time you see "v.4" in a post title, is how do we get statement 2, the laundry room scene to work? I've been thinking that maybe part of the problem is linking scenes to structure. In other words, I think the statement/response pattern is important to the film, but linking this structure to specific scenes is not. Maybe the problem isn't with the laundry room scene. Maybe it's the way it links to the desert scene. It might work to put the warning shot—whether it be a bird or whatever—in the desert. Maybe something happens to Ben's camera (that he uses to take a photo of the shrine interior). Maybe a bird whacks him in the head in the desert or whacks his car in the windshield. It's less clean structurally this way. Ben makes his statement (visiting the shrine) then the response occurs —a warning shot is fired. But instead of ending here, we go on to the clue-build in the laundry room. All of the other segments end with the response. That's the thing about the Star Wars films. Lucas generally goes for the cleaner structure, but I wonder if following your structure too religiously gets you into problems? Right about here, Ben and Erik are reading this and going "Nooooooo......" not another trip to the desert..." (This is just hypothetical you guys.)

Let's say that we did want to have a bird attack "warning shot" scene in the desert. How might that work? Pop in The Birds DVD. The first bird attack occurs when Tippi Hedrin is in the boat and the bird whacks her on the side of the head: Long build of Hedrin and Rod Taylor about to rendevouz. Hedrin is in the boat eye-flirting with Rod Taylor on the dock. Medium shot of a bird coming toward us (Hedrin POV). Shot of bird whacking Hedrin in the forehead, her hand covers her head reflexively. Bird flying away. Taylor on the dock wide leaps to attention. Medium of Hedrin looking at her hand with confusion. CU: hand with blood on finger. Taylor jumping down from dock.

It's always interesting to see how much information you need to make a scene comprehensible. It makes me recall the little bit I know about animation—that anticipation enables you to see things that occur too quickly otherwise. In my memory, the attack occurs in just one shot. In actuality, it's three—bird coming, bird hits, bird flies away. Without the shots bracketing the attack, there is probably not enough information to let the audience know what is going on. What makes the attack more surprising is the way it punctuates Taylor and Hedrin's meeting. We spend a long time building up this meeting and Hedrin is concentrating on Taylor at the moment of the attack which gives us the feeling that the bird comes out of nowhere.

v. 4 & Olympia

Still thinking through version 4 of the bird scene. Borrowed The Birds from the library. Still have to rework the props a bit. Rented Olympia. What a disappointment. I've been waiting for this thing to come out on DVD for years—Leni Riefenstahl's legendary sports film, the first Nike commercial. The transfer is terrible. We're talking Youtube quality here folks.

Disney animation today & yesterday: Chicken Little & 101 Dalmations

Sean's watching Chicken Little this week. The character design is beautiful, but the story is a crazy quilt stitched together with thread and scotch tape. I think when people talk about storytelling or plot, they are really trying to describe whether the film has been put together with dramatic integrity. Sean kept asking "is this the end?," not because he was bored, but because he couldn't figure out where he was in the film.

Sean also made it halfway through the original 101 Dalmations. I'm not sure why people think Disney was such a good storyteller. Many of the films he personally supervised—101 Dalmations, Peter Pan, Pinnochio—have always seemed awkward to me. The general feeling of these films is that the punctuation is wrong; some parts really drag, and some parts that ought to be dramatized are just glossed over (the exception, I think is Cinderella). Despite all this, 101 Dalmations is very watchable. Nice, fresh character design. And for a change, the humanoids and creatures seem to be living in the same universe. If I remember correctly, this is one of the first Disney films to bypass inking using the xerographic process instead. It helps to give everything a beautiful lively quality. I wonder if what makes the mid-century Disney films compelling is the abstract qualities of the animation woven together with narrative? Visually, 101 Dalmations is spontaneous and sizzling with energy. It's the expressionistic counterpart of Star Wars. Like Disney, George Lucas is usually an awkward dramatist. But the abstract mechanical qualities of his films (which are essentially animations) are compelling.

Also, last night I dreamt I was Werner Herzog's assistant as he put together a new documentary that examined everything from Polynesian seagoing ritual to fashion photography for the stage.

boopbeep, DV Rebel's Guide, Norm McLaren disc 5

It's the beginning-of-the-semester crunch. I did spend some time updating my other blog, however. You can see it at www.boopbeep.com.

I've been reading the fantastic DV Rebel's Guide by Stu Maschwitz of the vfx house The Orphanage. This is the guy who wrote Magic Bullet software. He has a great cheap hardware/software aesthetic. Tons of useful stuff on After Effects, guerilla shooting and cheap visual effects. A lot of the book talks about making The Last Birthday Card, a kind of sucky film that you can see on ifilm.com. Still, though, it's a no-brainer for undergrads and a half-brainer for grads.

Been viewing the Norm MacLaren box set. Disc 5 is the one you want. This disc features MacLaren's great principles of animation films. The theme of this disc is audio and you get to see and hear MacLaren's experiments creating audio by manipulating film.

The Thief Lord

Ben & Erik... take a look at this picture. This kid's movie from last .year is on my "to rent" list.

Alhambra & laundry room v.4

Shot Ben-waiting-outside exteriors in Alhambra at about eight this morning. It was freezing—almost literally. Last night, we had a 'hard freeze' which is rare in LA. Alhambra is a haven for mid-century one-story commercial architecture. I cut the shots together and they work well.

Afterwards, while eating bean and cheese burritos for breakfast, we talked about the bird scene. Ben had very specific, very good ideas about how it should work. Go handheld, start in light and move to darkness as if time has passed, moment of surprise when the clue comes together, prefigure the "shot across the bow." My ideas since Friday have focused more on the design: put newspaper over all the windows, use moving tree shadows, use a gobo to add weird shadows when shooting the interior, maybe go POV at the end of the scene. Sounds like it will all work. But it always seems like it will work. One thing that will have to change is the shrine interior. Making changes to the clue-building scene means making changes to the shrine itself so that the build can take place. A real domino effect. Not a big deal. The one thing we did forsee was needing to shoot around the details. Just another close up shot in the kitchen.

Been cleaning my hard disk and spent some time looking through the last laundry room shoot files. One shot (when run backwards) comes close to what we're going for in terms of mood. BTW, I'm pretty sure that's the 500 watt Omni shining through the window.

v. 4 They laughed when I sat down at the computer...

But when I started Quicktime, they still laughed. At least Ben and Erik did when they saw the edit of last week's shoot. They thought it looked like an instructional video for crafts. More HGTV and less late night horror flick. Plus, they didn't really like my new idea for the scene. So it looks like we're back to the birdhead.

Visually interesting, low-budget, oddball or thematically relevant films

Non-theatrical release
Dante's Inferno 100% puppets! FOUND (available on DVD/Netflix)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005) Green screen remix of the original—(FOUND DVD/Netflix)
Automatons Lo-fi robot flick—(FOUND DVD/Netflix)
Puzzlehead "Psychosexual gold" (FOUND Netflix instant)
Interkosmos Retro commie utopian space flick—(FOUND available on DVD)
The Week Before Dave McKean short (FOUND available on DVD 'Keanoshow')
We are the strange Lo-fi film that made it to Sundance—FOUND!

Theatrical release
Number 23 - FOUND!
Fissures
Bugmaster - FOUND!

I_figured_it_out_v3, The Illusionist

The laundry room set really is a laundry room. Note the
fragrance-free All in this test shot.

Well, after more testing that shadow approach didn't work. But I think I have a handle on the bird scene now. I was going to call this post "I REALLY have it figured out now," but who would believe me? It's kind of like calling a computer file "final.jpg." You know you're going to have to make changes to it and then call it "the_REAL_final.jpg." Then after more changes you end up calling it "the_REAL_final_this-is-really-it.jpg" and you'll never know which one is the right one. So that's why you should version your files.

I have to remember that film is literal. You just gotta show it. You can't hide behind mist or screens. The trick is to figure out how to show it without being heavy-handed or silly. I might actually have to get a real bird. I was thinking of a Finch.

Saw The Illusionist tonight. Sort of like Sanjuro for magicians. It starts great, gets worse, then gets a lot worse. If you haven't figured out the film halfway through you haven't seen any movies after 1990. Ed Norton's performance is wondrous. I loved the lecture/magic show featuring the orange tree. I heard Jessica Biel was a last-minute sub. I'm not sure exactly what her appeal is. Also, if they're in Austria, why are they all speaking with English accents? Probably the worst visual effects I've seen since Revelation. They could have titled the film Displacement Map City, especially since Rufus Sewell co-stars. There's just something about those Czechoslovakian effects houses (see UPP).

Still thinking...

Images from The Black Cat (1934)

Been thinking for the past three days how to make the laundry room scene work. Tried shadowy stuff. Did a bunch of camera and compositing tests. Newspapered the windows. Spent some time observing birds at Petco. Fast forwarded through The Black Cat with Lugosi and Karloff. Lugosi looks like he's on stage. Karloff is stoic, paradoxical, menacing, very contemporary. Directed AND designed by Edgar G. Ulmer. It's the old "stop at a rainy house at night" plot but with a house that looks like it's designed by Marcel Breuer. Been reading Mackendrick's On Filmmaking, a great book. Bailed halfway through Heinlein's Space Cadet which reads like a Boy's Life feature article from the fifties. The iPhone debuted today. The amount of time we've spent on this half-finished film + 6 months was enough to create that thing. Watched Mike Judge's Idiocracy. It was funny. Surprisingly good production value and effects. Why did Fox dump it?

To direct with a pure heart

I did the first assembly of the laundry room/bird scene this afternoon and... it was OK. I've been trying to figure out why it's so hard to make the damn thing work. If you recall, the first version of this scene was shot at the church. Then I decided that the church didn't look quite right so then we were going to shoot at the slide library. But then I nixed that idea opting for the laundry room instead. Then we shot a rehearsal, a lighting tech rehearsal and the real thing yesterday. And it's still not quite working.

Part of the difficulty is that I'm trying to imply the bird attack and not show it. That's really tough.

Second, I need to come to grips with what I'm after. I've been gradually excising all the "Hollywood" shots from the film because I realized I didn't like them—the narrative and camera gadgetry designed to generate suspense. Yet that is what this scene is supposed to be. If anything, it's like something out of Hitchcock's The Birds.

So I'm at odds with myself. On the one hand I'm trying to create a typical thriller/suspense scene and on the other hand I'm refusing to use any of the technique to get there. The solution is not a technical one, I think, but a matter of the heart. At a certain point you have to know what you want to do and do it. You can't have it both ways.

I've been veering between mainstream and the mundane. But maybe a third approach is necessary. My next idea is to use bird shadows and make the thing more abstract, more art-horror. That will allow me to actually show the attack but retain some mystery. Plus, in the current versions I've been strongly emphasizing the clue development. I think I need to reemphasize the bird attack and carefully work out the pacing. I think it will work. But I ALWAYS think it will work. I like something Magic Johnson once said. After a game a reporter asked him, "did you think that shot was going in?" He replied with a smile, "I think they're ALL going in." And most things are like that. In order to move on you have to really believe your next shot is going to work.

Laundry room shoot

Yesterday we shot the bird scene in the laundry room. We used the haze-in-a-can to get the shafts of light coming through the window. It's real sun so we couldn't control the fact that the light is shining toward Ben's butt. But the Ed Wood school of directing says that it adds realism. I didn't like scrambling around trying to finish before we lost the light. I felt like one of those plate spinners from the Ed Sullivan show running from angle to angle (cue "The Sabre Dance").

I cracked plexiglass to create the broken window effect. You don't get pretty spider web cracks, but with a few whacks of the hammer you get a surprisingly nice looking effect. Ben "Mr. Rack Focus" Davis wanted to get some rack focus shots going from the trees outside to the cracks in the glass so we did that. Somehow during breakfast we came up with the name "Solitary Davis." I like that for the name of his character. I tried putting food coloring blood on the cracks but that didn't look good. I'm finding that it's really hard to use blood. Every time I try it, it just looks stupid. It was windy so the plexiglass kept on flexing which didn't help with the glass illusion. We had to shoot around the wind. Shooting through glass creates all sorts of reflection and lighting problems. Fortunately we had those figured out from our tech rehearsal session the other week but there's still some awkward lighting here and there.

Ben and Erik thought the clues were too slick looking because they were photographs. Why are these computer printouts Erik asked. I was trying to convince him that they were supposed to be photographs of actual objects. The detail in these is really important and I couldn't think of another way to make it work. Plus I wanted to show them in color because it's prettier. Erik had the idea that Ben should break his pencil while writing so we shot that.

After we lost light we put the 500 watt Omni outside pointing through the window. When you take off the barn doors it looks kind of like the sun if you expose it right. We sprayed a bunch of haze and did some shots of Ben looking into the window just to see what it looked like. The backlit haze looked so "Friday the 13th." We also shot the shrine interiors trying to match outdoors. Not sure how that will work.

It took about four hours to do six setups. Kudos to Ben for shooting while sick and a purple heart to Erik for getting burned by the haze-in-a-can.

Blue clues

Today I cleaned out the laundry room for tomorrow's shoot. I'm scrambling to finish the clues. The transparency idea just didn't work... you can't see anything but a hazy jumble. So I'm trying it a different way with photos and tracing paper. Here's one of the clue images. The clue is in the stars.

p287

As you may have surmised, I'm cleaning and organizing this break, taking stuff from my hard disk and posting it here. I found this picture of an early jet aircraft. My notes are so sloppy I don't know if the jet is called the p287 or if it comes from page 287 of some book. The original spinner—when it was large and factory-sized—was going to look a lot like the wings of this plane: huge spinning wings on turbines with aerodynamic pods at the ends.

Note: some preliminary research indicates that this plane may be a Lockheed p-80 Shooting Star

Trailer

Behold, the link in the right hand column: the trailer! I just wanted to get something done so here it is. Pretty minimal. BTW, these are all the exciting scenes in the film. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's only one action: Ben looking. So the trailer features Ben looking at the table, Ben looking at a wall, Ben looking inside the shrine and Ben looking at the spinner. An academic's view of excitement: observation & research!

Short films I'm looking for

More modernist stuff...

Dreams That Money Can Buy: Max Ernst, Leger, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder

Disney's Destino: (Disney animates Salvador Dali) Coming soon to DVD in Disney Legacy Collection

ABC of sound: Moholy-Nagy

Water Ride (will Bill Irwin): Lane Smith

Bugs Bunny Cartoon: "No Parking Hare"—FOUND!

Salvage 1: TV show pilot starring Andy Griffith. Man builds a rocket out of junk and flies it to the moon!

More on the "Rosetta Stone" & The Yin & Yang of Mr. Go

Here's the latest version of the Rosetta Stone clue that I hope to shoot on Friday. It's part of a series of transparencies that leads Ben off the deep end. It probably doesn't look like much here. I hope it looks like more when we shoot it.

This evening's entertainment was The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go, a dollar store find. What can I say? I thought Frequency was weird. This was really really weird. Starring a was-he-ever-really-that-young Jeff Bridges and a was-he-ever-really-that-broke James Mason, this quirky B-ploitation film was directed by Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith who also plays a small role as a Chinese acupuncturist. Frontal nudity, lesbian rape, an anti-nuclear computer, blown-out VHS-to-DVD transfer and Shake Sauvage-vibed music—this one has cult favorite written all over it. The closest thing I can compare it to is Nancy Kwan's Wonder Women which I actually saw at the theater in Waikiki. But there's not enough skin or gloom and doom rays to make it work on any level. The twenty or so minutes I spent fast forwarding through this one suggests I should really consider getting my cable TV reconnected.

Some films I'm looking for

I'm looking for the following films for production design reference. Mostly German expressionist stuff cited in Prestel's Film Architecture.

Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (The Waxworks) 1924

L'Inhumaine (The inhuman one), 1924, Production design: Fernand Leger (laboratory)

Die Strasse (The Street), 1923

Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (From Morning Til Midnight), 1920 (see images above & below)

Set & costume design reference: Isamu Noguchi

Set & costume design reference: Robert Wilson

Theater reference

Some of you know that I'm a frustrated set designer. For years I've been collecting images of set design that I like and apparently my taste for modernism knows no bounds. I thought I'd post them so I can access them easily. Originally, our film was going to look something like these images, but I found that this approach didn't work well on tape. Maybe for another project.