Talked with Ben and Erik today for several hours about Assembly 2. Ben agreed with Dan that some areas needed to be more punctuated. Ben also said the first scene needed to be better developed. He felt that it read as a montage now and we discussed treating it as real time instead. To do that I need to reinsert the details of Ben entering the room, etc. In general, my problem is that I'm always trying to gloss over the boring areas and in doing so, I frequently leave holes. My work, in general, tends not to dot every "i" if possible, but sometimes you need to use good grammar, or in this case, good "film grammar." Ben and Erik also felt that the spinner shots needed to be longer. I said that I wanted to put some really long spinner scenes at the beginning to emphasize the long-spinning motion. But I didn't have any shots like that. Ben said why don't you just loop sections of the existing video? Brilliant! Or maybe I'm just dumb. Or not an editor. I never thought of that. So I'll try that... theoretically, it ought to work. Theoretically communism works. I also think the feeling is that the VO is sorely missed. It's interesting... the VO really serves to anchor and propel the narrative. Without it, you're engaged in this difficult task of really concentrating to figure out what's going on.
We spent a LONG time talking about the broken spinner. Concurrence with Dan on making the spinner break. We talked about how we could emphasize the fact that the spinner is broken. This is really important and not coming across. We then shot some test footage with Ben trying all sorts of actorly approaches. His first inclination was to go for sorrow. Mine was to go for anger. We tried some really over-the-top stuff. Ben's good at critiquing himself looking at the tape. I'll try cutting in the footage tonight to see how it looks. We tried two approaches. In one, the camera pushes in while Ben rushes toward the spinner. It sounds like it should work well, but strangely the second approach seemed to work better. In this approach, The camera is focused wide on Ben. He turns to the camera then rushes toward the spinner, but this time, the camera pedestals down to reveal the broken spinner.
Ben and Erik concur on the real-time, breakfast, going to work idea. We stopped at Ben's house this afternoon to see how his place would work. It's really disheveled now that they've moved into the new space. The color is bland ivory, but it will suffice. Ben concurred with Dan on the portable Memex. It's too distracting to do while driving and lessens emphasis on this important research task. Dan suggested making the Memex scene stationary but today we decided to nix it altogether and fold the research segment into a following scene. So the bird scene works like this. Ben finds a clue, goes out to the desert, sees "ex nihilo," cuts himself on the shrine, the bushes shake and then he drives off into the oncoming storm.
Then, the new scene.With Dan I was talking about making a spatial montage with flashes of papers and media in a bluescreen window. Here's what we have now. I did some minor changes subsequent to my discussion with Ben. The camera dollies past a series of books on the occult or other scary things. Presumably, he's been doing some research. Now we're on a closeup of Ben manipulating photocopies of scary pictures, presumably from his research. There are notations relating this to "ex nihilo." His hand is noticeably bandaged. The camera is pointing straight down rotating on Ben as he works on the floor or a table. As we get wider and wider, we see all of his items sprawled out. Finally we cut to a closeup of his finger which is now black. Erik had the good idea that maybe somewhere, we foreshadow the blood. Maybe blood is dripping here and there or the like.
A couple of things. I was saying that when we do this scene, we need to make sure that the sprawl doesn't reduce the punch of the red room by going overboard. Ben made the excellent point that these are two different kinds of sprawls. The red room is a result, an organized sprawl. In this scene, on the other hand, Ben is just starting to figure it out. So we don't have to worry about going overboard. Plus visually, they will be much different. This scene is on a table or a floor. The red room scene is, uh, red. Second, Ben's inclination was also to put the black finger at the beginning of this scene. But the more that I think about it, I think we need to end with a greater punch.
Then, not many notes on the red room except Ben says start the jib shot to the gas line earlier so that we can see what's happening. Good point. If anything, I tend to cut too short and really tight.
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