WEEK 4

This week started by having my tutorial with Miranda. It was a great way to start the week as it gave me a kind of push to start cracking on with my work since Monday. I feel like this tutorial was helpful to make me feel a sense of urgency with my project, I feel like I’ve been putting a lot of work on it but its still a big challenge so I have to make sure to stay in track with my progress.

From last week I still had to finish up doing the story board. This has been a long process because I really tried to imagine every shot and detail that I could as well as the scenography of it and it involved a lot of creative process. I’ve really enjoyed this part of the process and feel like it might be one of the ambits that I get into professionally. I feel like this film is giving me a great insight of all the sections involved in movie production.

Here are some photos of the story board process of creation:

This are the final three pages of storyboard:

Having finished the stage of storyboarding I passed to the next step: writing the script. I have to accept that I underestimated the difficulty of this process. I had never written or barely read scripts and I’ve discovered the whole world that script writing, I’ve found tremendously complicated the challenge of writing in a complete different form that what I’m used to and to be able to balance giving importance to the text and at the same time following each shot that I had already stated on the storyboard. This stage of the process has really made me take into account the fluidity and timings of the movie, as well as anything related to the sound. I’ve also been thinking of who I can use to do the voiceover, as most of my friends are international and I also want it to be an expressive person vocally. On the other hand, I’ve also learned in Creative Documentary, that the voiceovers are almost always voices of men to create a sense of authoritarian figure so I am looking to find hopefully a woman to do my voiceover in order to break this toxic representation of gendered authority.

Here I have what is the first draft of the script but what I think is the the right amount to give me the idea of script needed to start recording. I’m interested on starting recording as soon as possible and so to be able to overcome any problems that I might encounter on the process. Later on I will perfect the final script and apply the voiceover.

This is the document of the first draft:

In order to get inspired in the process of writing a creative, poetic, but at the same time natural script, I’ve been investigating the Russian film-maker, scriptwriter and film theorist Andrei Tarkovsky. He is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time, his films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes, and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and preoccupation with nature and memory.

I haven’t been able to watch any of his movies as a whole yet but have been able to watch lots of clips of them separately and analyse his way of expression and how to apply it to my own film. I was weirdly struck by this clip:

On the other hand, Miranda also recommended me some Iranian minimalist films which I’ve also been looking into. The one that I’ve liked the most is “White balloon” mostly impressed by it’s use of colour to transmit the message, as well as the simple but metaphorical feel of it.

This week I’ve also been thinking about the scenography of the movie, so the places were I want to record as well as the objects that I want to appear in them. I’ve been charity shopping getting all the objects that I want to add, but the only things that I haven’t been able to find yet are a round table and yellow mugs. I’m going to keep trying to find yellow mugs but I think I will have to settle with the low round table at school of art because I haven’t been able to find anything else.

On the other hand I’ve also been trying to find a walnut tree in Aberystwyth to record the shots involving the tree. I found a guide online which assures that there is a walnut tree in Aberystwyth and indicates it very vaguely but I’ve spend a whole day trying to find it and haven’t been able to so I’ve decided to follow Miranda’s idea of the character being surprised about finding the walnut in the UK when there aren’t supposed to be. I’ve also found green shots that can be nice as sets.

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Finally, I wanted to end my post of the week with a recap of the workshop that we did on Friday. I showed up to class without having any idea of what to expect and I was happily surprised with a group activity of cooking all together a curry. We were presented a work were they considered cooking in a gallery art itself, as it creates debates and sharing and is in itself a performance. This made me considered deeply what we can consider as art and how we can turn the mundane into art. Basically learning that anything can be considered as art and that we as artist can enrich anything into art by just shedding a focus on it and giving it importance and deepness. The workshop was lovely and I truly enjoyed cooking together and most of all the talk after whilst eating it. I thin that it was a truly bonding experience and a great part of my culture that I miss over here.

I also commented on how I’m think of myself as a sieve as I can’t retain knowledge and Miranda made me see that I’m a sieve but in a positive way, that I love to research and surround myself of change and that I need to let go of things to let space for the important ones to stay and that at the end of the day everything importance is held in place. This might seem as an unimportant comment but it has really made an impact on my personal time, life and relations, making me reconsider what are the things in my life that I have to drain in order to let important pieces be held.