User:Inge Hoonte/Notes 10/10

Lena

Develop previous set design and play of Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, into a 10min film. More opportunities for camera placement and angle, and therefor audience experience.

Response to 5 QUESTIONS
1 What is going to be my role?
There are several paths I think. This could either be a straight up adaptation of a play onto film. Or the film format could offer opportunities to include footage that was shot off-stage. Like you say, the play was staged as a fourth wall set-up. What I always like about stage plays is the opportunity to give a view of what happens behind the set. Everything is exposed. Could help to look at examples of films where this shifts, the classic character talking to the camera as a narrator, or films within a film where the set is often exposed, so the viewer keeps dwindling in and out of am I watching a film? Or is it about the life of the actors who play the film, or both.

2 Is the room going to change during film, if yes, what/how?

3 What's going to happen betw actors?

4+5 What will be perspective of camera? How will the film be presented to the audience?
>> Aernout Mik's work and installations come to mind. He often uses single take, long, extended scenes, pan, in which everything, rehearsed happens and unfolds all at once. In the past, often multi-screen installations that formed a 'room' around the viewer. Last years what I've seen are bigger projections, on their own.

Eija Liisa Ahtila.

Contact Goat Island Performance Group --> They were my tutors at SAIC, and a live performance group from Chicago, who made two film adaptations of their work. Might be possible to order on DVD.

These ideas of camera angles and playing with the different narrative angles / characters within a story also makes me think of Sam Taylor Wood's 8 screen video installation 'Sigh,' which was on view at Kunsthal earlier this year. From The Guardian's Visual Art Review: "Taylor-Wood's video installation, Sigh, features members of the BBC Concert Orchestra, playing Anne Dudley's specially commissioned score - without their instruments. Rather than render the music oddly incorporeal, this makes us focus more on what musicians do - the clarinettist wriggling his lips; a violinist's worried eyes tracking the conductor; the concerted ballet of gestures. It is grounded, compelling human drama. The artist of the floating world has finally landed on something worthwhile." The audience is in the middle of the room, able to walk up to the screen, and witness several sections of the orchestra 'at rest,' while other silently play. Video here

Daan

Disclaimer: my notes on your text and work became a bit of free-flow soup, my apologies.

Paragraph: "I am standing the edge of a cliff and now is the moment to jump off. (...) think about my biggest fears" Beautiful metaphor to start your thesis with. I also remember from your introduction week presentation, you said something about leaving the nest, finding a home, not feeling at home anywhere. These seem intertwined, and strongly come back in your text.

About the text
As a script, I miss the setting, description of surroundings, props, etc. Some of this might be more appropriate for voice over? This comes to mind more because you were sitting next to Loes in class, and your work started to co-mingle just now in my mind. Maybe your actors don't have to say anything.

It's incredibly honest about not belonging, and the attempt to connect to people while pushing them away at the same time.

Makes me think of Richard Linklater - Slacker (1991)

Some passages that stick out to me
It can't decide who he prefers, me or my brother and we both keep rejecting him. (this can also refer to Rotterdam, or the sense of being at home)
The cold purifying water extinguishes the flaming lies in my body.
Fuck them, I don't need them.
I feel like I’m floating through the carcass of a gigantic whale, I slide towards his stomach and can’t stop myself.
silently they watch me sliding to the end
I wish somebody would stop me
(attempt to approach new people) ... I ask her with pain in my stomach. (then pushes her away with asshole remarks)
all their eyes are kicking me in the stomach
everyone spits on me
they all want me to fuck off
I am such an asshole
I'm in no control of my body, I am motionless
I fall down in eternal darkness
motherliness (loneliness?

Response to questions
I wonder if it might help you more to make small sketches the coming weeks. Rather than setting out with this heavy weight (or at least that's my interpretation of your text thusfar) to make a feature film, documentary film, fiction film, these grand ideas that can baffle one to even get started. Focus on small inklings of ideas you have, things you wonder about, stuff that sparks you. I think that came back in the short film about the ball. You saw something simple, you did something more with it, you explored angles. I'm saying this more because this helped me make a collage-like, vignette video piece, of which I showed a scene in the intro week. I think for beginning script writers, or people who generally write short stories like myself, it can be daunting to set out and write one big narrative that always 'makes sense.' Letting go of making sense and impressing others is what will get you off the cliff, as you already seem to suggest in your questions and paragraph. The sketches might lead you to scenes for a longer film, or a 56-channel video installation, who knows.