This afternoon I stopped by Ben's house. I showed him and Erik the most recent cut and apparently they think it's fine. Ben seems to be feeling that the scenes are being punctuated properly now so our long discussion from the other Friday must have helped. I also asked him about the "bridge" scene. The bridge scene is a transition from the desert to the red room. In the desert, he gets cut on the finger and things get ominous. In the red room, Ben is maniacal. I was wondering if we could just skip the bridge scene and just go to the red room—not the full red room, but a few documents in the red room that build to the whole thing. I forgot why the bridge was in there anyway.
Ben said it was like an aria in opera where you imply you're going to hit a high note several times but don't quite get there. Then finally, in the climax you get there. The bridge should be a way of both easing and developing tension. You can't sustain the development of tension for too long he said. Sounds good to me. But I'm still not sure what this should look like. The bridge was once part of the bird scene—doing research in a church. Then it became research in the laundry room. Then research in the slide library. It has to accomplish three things—
>connect "ex nihilo" to scary images
>show Ben incorporate an everyday pop cultural item (or items) into his thinking
>show Ben's gross bloody finger
Most recently, this scene has existed as the rotating pull out, the green screen window with collage images in the window and looking at slides. This scene should be fun. It's where things start to get abstract. There's not much to accomplish in this scene since it's not nearly as linear as the others. This scene also transitions from a linear "normal" world to a more abstract, flatter world. Maybe that's what's making it hard. So I should add the following to the above list—
>transition from normalcy to abstract flatness.
Whatever the case, there's something difficult about this scene. Coming up with ideas is no problem. Coming up with the one idea that seems like the best solution is more elusive.
While I was at Ben's I also shot some footage of baby Sara, now almost a year old. The camera was white balanced for indoors and she was outdoors and she photographed the most beautiful bluish pink color. It was a nice look that for some reason reminded me of old super 8 films. I was thinking that maybe there's some way to integrate the footage into the film. Maybe the footage would be in the background to imply that Ben has a family. Everyone likes babies.
I'm beginning to realize how many 'effects' shots I have—much more than I detailed in that post the other day. I also have the videotape distortion shots, the "intruder" view effect and desert trash removal. I think we're going to be at about 60 to 70% effects shots. I've been thinking maybe it's time to put things into After Effects. The way you're supposed to do it is to take your uncompressed timeline into AE and final it there so your project gets recompressed only once. But I think I'm going to go another way that will be more efficient in the long run. I'll probably do the effects shots as separate pieces saved in Animation compression. Then I'll final those shots in AE. That will save lots of rendering time.
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