User:Inge Hoonte/Notes Lena

Lena 10/10

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 be a straight up adaptation of a play onto film. Or on the other hand, the film format could include footage that was shot off-stage, at a character's house, or things like that. 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.
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