Showed the rough assembly to Ben, Erik and Gene yesterday morning. Ben thought it was light years beyond the previous version in terms of making sense. That was encouraging. The main difference between this version and the other was that I rewrote the voice over a lot and I also worked on the structure. This past week I happened to read a section in Mackendrick's On Filmmaking that describes a concept called "point of attack" or something similar. It's the place where the story starts and is different from a 'non-canonical situation.' In the earlier version, there was no point of attack so I added one. Curiously, this makes the structure a little strange. There are four attack/counter attack sequences now instead of three. But it works better. I also added a short bridge sequence before the red room to soften the transition. It's more narration and blunt narration at that. But it makes the film more understandable and more fluid. It's also interesting how much difference music makes structurally. I found that long sequences like the falling stars work fine if the music swells to animate the shots.
We talked about one of the attack sequences and speculated that a "fly attack" might work for that. Ben, very seriously, described how easy it would be to wrangle a fly. You put it in a refrigerator to slow it down. Then attach it to a thread and warm it back up. Of course he was expecting ERIK to do that. Erik gave his "yeah right" look. This is where my current thinking on vfx and its problems comes into play. The temptation of fx is to visualize something that sounds good in your head. You brute-force an image into existence. But a lot of the time, these images really don't work well. That's why a lot of fx don't look good... they were never meant to be images in the first place. So we'll have to do some fly shadow tests. Will the effect look better as a practical shadow or a composited particle swarm or what? Or maybe even a totally different image? You just have to try it and see. Now you know why this thing is taking so long to complete.
Later I had lunch with Mona so I showed the rough to her. Craig thought the spinner was a composite and so did Mona, thus the title of this post. Mona didn't understand exactly what was happening but she said it was interesting to watch. Mona is kind of like your mom—she will always find something nice to say. But I think she was saying that the film is hard to follow logistically but there is a kind of forward momentum. If that's what comes across to others then I will feel like what we've succeeded in terms of structure. I think one thing that detracts from conventional legibility is that there is a kind of fluid quality to the film—not visually, but because of the narrative and the wall-of-music temp track. I like the way these create an underlying similarity... the bird attack is just as dramatic as discovering a clue or looking athe spinner. In the end, the effect is to induce drowsiness, but that is pretty typical of everything I do. I just like that quality. I remember watching the old Monty Python TV show. Everything transitioned seamlessly giving the show a dreamy quality. The other thing that Mona said was that the piece definitely has a mysterious quality. That's the one thing I knew would come across. Dreamy and mysterious.. that's me.
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