Janis DESCRIPTIONS OF THE VISUAL NOTES

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE VISUAL NOTES:

+ Weathering love;

+ Kids with guns;

+ Cacti collection room;

+ Trophy house;

+ The archive of slides;

+ Her manual blog;

+ The romanticism of wilderness;

+ The value of a perfume;

+ What creates mood and atmosphere?

+ Nightmarish animal portraits;

Protagonist - my grandmother

Antagonist - my grandfather

Time: present, past in present and past

Love letters: weathering love

My grandmother is opening a box full of letters. Those are the deepest personal experience of love between her and my grandfather. They were writing when he was serving in the Soviet Union army somewhere in far east Russia near by China. She starts to read his letters where he is describing his feelings for her, the surroundings and circumstances of the place and the weather, all its written in a very poetical way. The action of the scene takes place in their living room, it is an old house in the east country side of Latvia. While she is exposing the deep poetic writings, he is busy by the computer. At the beginning he is not paying attention, but in a certain point when it gets intimate, he is trying to interrupt her reading. In the mean time her intention is just raising the level, she is flying 60 years back in her memories, totally grabbed by the letters. She continues to unfold the personal writings which were kept in a secret only between them for a long, long time. These discoveries are drawing an totally opposite image of him, displaying the inner side which was hidden behind the hard nut shell for 60 years. It seems like an act or comedy sketch which is directed and performed by two old people. It raises question wether it is documentary or fiction? The camera is staged and the image is pretty cinematic, all of the decorations and low light conditions in the room seems like ready made. There is clock ticking in the background.

Cacti collection

My grandmother has a collection of cactuses. She has it for more than 50 years. Her husband was always helping her to take care of them and he was constantly documenting all the highlights, new flowers or set ups of compositions by his wife. A big part of my grandfathers images from the time when he was shooting on diapositive slides are documentation of her collection. Flowers and cactuses, process of blooming and so on. Now, when I was watching the diapositive slides together with them, they were questioning them selves, why do they have all these images of flowers. I am still wondering, how come my grandmother chosed to collect cactuses? An action scene takes place in the same living room where they are watching these diapositive slides and discussing about the past. These conversations are unfolding some details from their relationship. Cactus is self-sustainable, hard to destroy, does not need much care, it is beautiful, but at the same time protective with sharp needles. Does it say something about her personality? Or him? How does the personal interests construct the character? Is my grandfather the main cactus of my grandmothers collection?

+ Parfume

Beauty and value. There are specific deceases which can be find on top of an cactus. My grandmother is using a perfume against it, she takes her perfume and sprays it all over the cacti, saying that it helps to heal it. Does it matter what kind of perfume it is? No. She can also use her Channel. What does it mean Channel for her?

+ Diapositive slides

Another action scene takes place while they are watching diapositive slides and they are discussing about the images. It was very interesting to get back to this old process of observing pictures. The funny thing is that those diapositive slide images have never been printed, they are the one and only originals which one can see projected. In the scene these images are passing one after another leaving a "click" sound from the projector. Personally, it was interesting to experience this process, to load all these slides, watch the projection on the wall and to hear the sound of the sliding box when every time it is changing the picture. It is kind of a magical nostalgic feeling.

Double TV set: Synopsis

The link for the contra-dictional love. In the scene there are two TV's running at the same time. Both characters are in front of them watching each their own stuff, but at the same time paying attention on what is the other watching. The atmosphere is non-pressured, it is the daily life. I believe, it is important to keep things in balance and each one is taking some kind of a compromise. What I mean, at this point is the possible choices of what to watch. Anyway, there is an overlap of information. It is interesting to observe the influence of mass media on my grandparents. Some times when I visit them, they are only talking about the stuff what they saw on TV. For example a stupid show about young brides looking for a groom or the latest results of latvian tennis player or biathlon race.

+ Grandmothers manual blog

My grandmother has an extraordinary passion to collect and save information. The thing is that it started 50 years ago back when she was teaching in a primary school. She was preparing lesson materials for kids, later on she was collecting some advices for friends wedding parties. Even more later on she started to collect info for to be good in cross words. The thing is that she has all of these self made notebooks but only she knows how to orientate in those. There is no particular structure or alphabetical order or what so ever. There is no system how the information is organized, and there is no criteria of importance or what is it about. For her it is helpful if she forgets something in the crosswords. She can find answers in the notes or add the question if it is something new. When I looked at these notebooks it reminded me about a Facebook wall or even a blog where people are posting their discoveries, information what they study or experiences. Her notebooks are more specific in issues, reminding about time, but it's kind of general info, it is all the stuff that people do not write down any more because somebody did it already, you just have to hit google or the wiki. I was wondering if the crosswords still work for the new generation, the information age when we can google anything? How do we archive information right now when everything is online, is there a need, to actually do it? Does the freedom and open source helps us or does it makes us more confused because of all the decisions that we have to make before looking for something? Personally, sometimes I feel really lost in the world wide web like in my grandmothers notebooks.

The trophy house with with the nightmarish animal portraits

Lately, I was visiting my uncle. He is an passioned hunter and owns a trophy house, his own kind of museum full of stuffed animals. One floor is from Latvia and other floor contains animals from all around the world. I did spend some time in this place documenting and admiring these species, artificial documents of realness. and overall my uncles passion. It is his own exhibition, solo show of his achievements and presents. It is pretty interesting feeling, the house is full of hyperreal taxidermic master pieces but on the other hand it is very educational and interesting to have this possibility, to see and feel the wilderness in front of Your nose, though the thing is pretty dead. Personally, I really admire this place, because I am amazed about my uncles passion and the way how he keeps things in order, archives stuff and extends his passion in numerous ways. In the scene I made some close up portraits from the figures, documentation from the space. - I need to return there and made some video recordings, move simultaneously trough the space and focusing on the closeness of the animal I want to reenact a scene of an dream with these frozen figures.

The hunt

While I was digging into my grandfathers photo archive, I found a lot of images from childhood of my father and his brothers. It was interesting that my uncles used to pose with guns in these family pictures. I was questioning myself, if that was a set up by my grandfather as an photographer or as an father who was raising three sans? For many years my grandfather was a hunter. As well as photographer and together with his wife they were blooming flowers and selling them in the markets. On the other hand, hunting was his passion, the desire to go outside in the wilderness, probably prove him self and bring home some meet. The interesting thing for me is that he was both, romantic and passioned on two sides, blooming flavors, hunting animals and taking photographs of everything.

How a passion is constructing an identity

The oldest of my uncles nowadays is a successful sportsman and hunter. He is practicing sporting and shooting in a stand. I have an idea to making a documentary about him and his passion. I was documenting his trophy house of hunted animals and I went for a hunt together with him. I am looking forward to explore his passion and draw a hunters portrait from the personal point of view. I am interested in the fact of animal surveillance which is one of the main things in the process that hunter does. I would like to create another approach for it, involving my skills as a media designer. I am looking forward to use different surveillance techniques. For example, I am looking forward to built an quad copter and attach a video camera to it so I can fly around and record video footage from above. Also there are places in the woods where I will leave some surveillance cameras in the woods for experimental reasons and check the daily life and path of the animals. Thinking about surveillance and the particular video experiments I would like to compare it to the society and the system of control and disciplinary societies what Foucault was arguing about. I would compare a hunter to the mass control instrument which is for example an governmental institution. I don't see yet a particular outcome for this video experiment, maybe I will collect some data about the animals or catch some nice images from the nature and so on. At the moment for myself it would be important to start these surveillance experiments and try to get some visual footage. Animals are scarred from people, they are running away and hiding in the woods. For me, it would be interesting to see whats going on in their society, I don't have the tension to control them or somehow affect, only observe. Also, I would like to see their reaction to a flying robot or an surveillance camera in the woods, are they going to react on it or ignore?

Photo albums and dia slides ?

POSSIBLE STORY LINE value + couse:

+ The compromise in a relationship for 60 years. How does that work? + Connecting dots between the reality, memories and illusions + The characteristics of an cactus