Poster

I forgot to include this before. Ages ago, Michelle designed a beautiful poster for our project out of a couple stills. I'm not sure our film will still be called The Holistic by the end of it, but for now it's pretty awesome:

A Lesson in Pacing

So, as it turns out I have not changed the interview structures at all from my first cut. However, I've added more than a minute to my run time, merely by stretching out the pacing. Who says everything needs to be fast, huh?

I've also added new elements to the sound design and will have Michelle mix everything since my ears don't function properly. My hope is that the interviews emerge from a wilderness of ambient sound design. In this way, the interviews would not be dominant but merely part of the overall ensemble.

Once I finish with this section, I'm going to dive into my musical portion. I'm thinking about using the following quote for the Part II:

"There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer." - Eugene Ionesco

In any case, wish me luck. We'll see what's what next week.

Structure and Direction

So progress goes slow. Perhaps just because I am torn between two directions for the film. Part of me wants to continue with the original triptych structure that takes you through the course of human life. To be honest though, that might be too much. When I first wrote about this project, my ideas were centered on death and a lot of my interviews tended to drift to that idea, so I'm tempted to center the entire project just on that (death through the eyes of religion). Of course, my questions did not center just on death and I had no structure in mind, so in terms of its development I'm thinking about doing some mixed form (essayistic, pure visual musical section, etc). I've worked a little on the project over the last week but to be honest I've been more in my head. I've also junked most of what I have worked on. I know I'm going to come out of my head soon.

More news about our incoming film stock and our kindred sister project Baptism hitting Strange Beauty soon.

First Assignment

So, by later today Michelle will have finished up some last minute sound adjustments on the first 6 minutes of our film (or the last 6 minutes, or the middle 6 minutes, I have no idea at this point).

Beyond not knowing exactly where the piece will be fitting in, I actually feel very good about it. I went through our audio and set up the basic order of each interview segment and Michelle developed a sound design around that basic structure. I then checked in periodically with the sound design and gave her constructive feeback on adjustments and she's tweaked things accordingly.

I also set up a tenative visual structure for the cut, which is subject to change when we get our film in (tomorrow!). Michelle tweaked the first digital shot with a layered superimposition. My instinct is to strip this down to its original shot and keep all shots as basic pure form representations but I left the shot to see what the class thinks about it. We'll see. I could be swayed.

Really, that's all there is to say about the project so far. I think we could potentially get to the point where we would finish an early cut of the film ahead of schedule, which would give us time to concentrate on fine tuning and cameraless. Knowing how busy my schedule can get, that's my goal right now.

Oh, also, we should have a clear idea about the complete structure by the time we turn in our next assignment.