transparent, see?

I’m having a bit of trouble actually posting the embedded video to the site here. So, here is a link to the video.

I have combined, below, both pieces of our final writing piece for the class. My final project video is complete and will be posted soon!

I started filming for the final project during Spring Break–now over a month ago. Several things come to mind about my initial vision and the final projects ability to capture what I was hoping it would. I reread my little “screenplay” down there, and can’t help but feel a little disappointed. I don’t regret so much the places where the final video falls short because of things that I can’t control–my son’s acting and patience level the chief uncontrollable element–but rather I wish I could have made more of the parts that were in my control.

That initial criticism out of the way, I am pleased with this as a final product. It reminds me in many ways of the process that I go through when I compose other kinds of text: a paper, a song, even a blog post like this one. It goes something like this:

I have an initial idea.
I begin work on the execution of that idea.
I hit some speed bumps–some elements don’t work the way I expected, but this is sometimes good.
I discover something that I didn’t plan on and there is some excitement.
I work an element that didn’t seem significant in the initial thought, and it also takes me in a new direction.
I write/film/play hoping that the inspiration keeps coming–as it often does–in the moment.
Then it starts to be a grind.
I start to hate the thing.
It’s surely my worst work ever.
Self-doubt and self-loathing.
Finally a bit of relief–do something different for a while. Played a different song; watched some tv; played with my kids, etc.
Progress comes in spurts–the creative juices are starting to be depleted.
I finish. It feels good. It feels bad. I want keep on wanting to tweak it.

When Joseph and I met last week, he mentioned something about final element–he equated it to a painter who really has something special and then screws it up by not knowing when to stop. After our meeting, I was talking to my dad about it. He’s a painter, and remembers his instructor/mentor telling him that very thing: “You’ve got it–stop messing with it!” That piece of advice was poignant for both my dad and me.

Speaking more specifically about this last piece, there were several parts of it that I really liked. Some elements went exactly as I envisioned. I really love the stuff that I filmed in Nauvoo , IL–a tiny town on the Mississippi with wide open spaces and old buildings. The secret is that it is a total fluke that I even recorded there. I had the camera along just in case and even forgot it in the car when we arrived. I went back and got it on a whim. But the scenes there in Nauvoo are, I think, by far the best in the video. The Mississippi river was gorgeous that day, the sun was reflecting off it in a perfect, mesmerizing way. 30,000 birds were all singing. Even after I shot it, I didn’t know how special it was. It wasn’t until it was in context with both the other pieces in the film and then with the audio track that it came alive for me. This is very typical of my work. The best parts are never planned. They are almost always spontaneous, which would be alright, I guess–except that spontaneity is, um, spontaneous. And, especially in this case, it was totally random. So I worry about some future project when the happy accident doesn’t happen.

I like the part on the stairs with the ghostly flash; I like the opening dreaming bit; I love that my boy was sweet enough to do this. He deserves a medal.

I have now included a “blooper reel” at the end of the film. While it is common to have access to this kind of thing on film texts, whether it be during a movie’s credits or as a special feature on the DVD, a forum for extraneous or abandoned ideas is much less common in our alphabetic textual compositions. (Rarely, an literary author might include an alternate ending and scholarly works are often rife with footnotes, which gives an author a kind of meta-commentary on their own ideas–still not really like a blooper reel.) My kids are funny and did some pretty funny stuff on tape–messing up lines, inserting weird stuff, not following directions, etc. These pieces, especially now that they are built into the film, seem very important to the final piece. Showing the silly stuff–which also gives the audience a sense of the labor that went into producing it–gives the film a sense of completion to me that is very satisfying. I suppose you could argue that it is the composer’s job to erase any signs of the labor that went into creating a text. But I think that such access points–again, much like the a “behind the scenes” special feature on a DVD, humanize the text. I really like that.

There are a few deleted scenes that don’t show up. These are scenes that I thought would work in various locations that just didn’t. I filmed a whole bit in front of the Main Library and another bit on the Engineering quad. They didn’t really work, I guess. Or maybe they just belabored the point. Giving the audience access to these scenes would have been useful, I suppose, if I were Scorsese, but since I am not, they would have been the equivalent of showing a series of sentences that in different words say the same thing.

Finally–and by finally, I mean it was the very last thing that I did–I gave the piece a title. I (generally) wouldn’t accept a final writing project from a student that didn’t have a title and so assigning one to this project has always been in the back of my mind. I decided on “the sparrow” for a few reasons. The first is that one of my favorite elements in the film is that in nearly every scene filmed outside, birdsong can be heard. Birds can be heard with increasing ferocity near the film’s apex as the boy approaches the river. Again, it was serendipitous for there to be birdsong at all, but they ended up–I think–to be one of the most important pieces of the film. Contrasting the undeniable presence of the birds is the boy’s isolation. He is a small bird in a very big world. Small, alone and on his own for the first time. Like a sparrow.

In the end, the piece was supposed to be about rediscovering something that was lost. When I started, I thought that I knew what that thing was, but it turned out to be something else.

Alas, the .3g2 format that my phone spits out its movies in is not compatible with iMovie.  That’s ok, I suppose.  Reinforcements coming in today.

So I went up to the third-floor checkout window on Friday afternoon to grab my equipment for my Spring Break shoot–excited by the prospect of getting to keep the stuff all week.

It didn’t dawn on me that every single other WWV undergrad would have the same idea. All of the cameras were gone and I was left in a bit of a panic. (So THAT’S why they have a reserve option!)

So, I immediately started thinking about what I could do to remedy the situation. Strangely (or not) I find these kinds of situations, after the initial panic diminishes, to be fairly good for my creativity. After our discussion in last week’s class, I had already been thinking about how I could change up my film to make it a bit easier to film and this new constraint–having no equipment in which to film–made it all the more interesting.

I decided to film the video with very little or no dialog. This would help the situation a bit with my son’s trouble in delivering a believable line, but would also make shooting a bit easier. So that changed things a bit.

Having no equipment was a new problem. I thought “maybe I can film the video using the camera on my phone.” This idea seems kind of ridiculous, but the more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued. It created some interesting constraints–the first of which is that my phone will only take 15 second videos. That might be interesting though. Also, it is very low quality–but again this might make for a cool aesthetic during the dream scape sequences that make up most of the video.

Anyway, I thought a lot about this option but, as it turns out, my wife’s sister is coming to visit us on Wednesday, and she has a decent camcorder that will work and is bringing it. So I am bailed out a bit. The last few days would have made crummy filming days anyway due to the weather, so the plan is this: play with the camera phone option tomorrow. Take some footage, see if I can even get it into iMovie and then if none of that works out, use my sister-in-law’s camera when she gets here.

phew.

Scene 1:
Dark screen: noises, voices, inaudible, layers becoming frenzied. And then silence.
Boy: (close-up on the eyes) they open, look left, look right. “Mom?”
Cut to rooms. They are empty, but look as though they have recently been occupied. Boy looks from room to room, slowly at first but starts to become more and more panicked. He doesn’t cry.
(quick cuts) In the kitchen, someone has been cooking eggs. Boy pushes chair over to counter, gets out a plate and a spatula and serves himself. Sits at the table eating. There is fear in his eyes. A single tear?
He dresses, exits, and finds nobody on the street. Starts walking.
Montage of boy walking (far shots and long shots mixed with shots of emptiness. Through parks, down streets, always alone.

He arrives in a complex of buildings. He enters a building, goes up stairs, opens another door and finds another complex of stairs. He continues to go up. Walks down a hall, turns and exits out a door, which leads outside, but a different building. Still, emptiness.
Walks to another building, opens it, goes in. Emerges to the outside again. Turns back, same thing.
Looks out to the middle of a distant clearing where he sees someone standing (lost moment?)
He begins walking toward the figure. (first person perspective) Heavy breathing, he trips. Stands back up.
When he arrives at the figure, he discovers a boy in a shirt and tie with closely shaved hair. The boy is him.
Boy one: “Who are you?”
Boy two: (smiling) “I am you.”
Boy one: “How? This isn’t possible.”
Boy two: “That is a question to which there is no answer.”←this is a lame line. I think I may just have the boy not answer.
Boy one: “Where is everyone? Why am I alone? Where is everyone?”
Boy two: “You are not alone.”
Boy one: “I am. I am alone. And now I am lost”
Boy two: “You aren’t alone and you aren’t lost. Every turn you have made today has led you here. To me.”
Boy one: “What should I do? How do I get back to how it used to be—to where I used to be?”
Boy two: “You don’t. You can’t. You can only keep going. Keep going. “

Boy one hears a noise and looks momentarily away. When he looks back, the boy has vanished.
He returns home. It has grown late. He opens his front door, walks upstairs, gets in his bed and closes his eyes.
Darkness.
Then the same voices from the opening scene. This time, the boy awakes and has become a man. The hair and clothing are similar to the boy in the clearing. He looks over and finds his wife sleeping. Looks out the window and sees:
The world in motion. (motion montage)

Last week’s chat about constraints and time limits got me looking again at my posted project.  It runs long–nearly 5 minutes and I thought that rather than just rage against the constraints, it would be a good exercise to try to do some critical cutting.  So I did.  This is the same video–in essence.  I have cut about a minute and a half of the original total length.  I think it is a more concise, “tight” version of the piece–though it did force me to get rid of at least one of my favorite parts from the original.   I appreciated the exercise though–in many of the clips I was able to shave off a few seconds of stuff that was extraneous.  Critical revision is something we haven’t done officially in class, but the act of shortening my piece here reminded me a lot of the revision process that I go through when I write/rewrite.[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3g9mWoT_I4] 

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCvARoSCngQ]

Seth is crying again. His little sister is tormenting him. Likely she is sitting on him or chasing him around the house, or worse, has delivered a swift blow to some portion of exposed skin. But just as quickly, Maryn is now in tears, Seth elated either because of the punishment exacted on naughty sister or because it is now his turn to watch the television show of his choice. Jonas is just learning to walk—it is exciting, inspiring even, to witness first steps. There is constant cleaning and cooking going on. When one meal has been prepared and cleaned up, it is nearly time for the next meal to begin. The other short pieces of the day are characterized by simultaneity—one kid in tears, the other two fighting; one of them has to go potty—right now!—while another demands some milky or a cookie or a book or some other kind of attention. Three voices at once shouting, laughing, crying, demanding, sassing, singing, and then, finally, snoring.
Being a parent—especially when it is multiplied by three—is feeling nearly every human emotion possible, often within the same minute. Joy when they do something unexpected or say or sing something sweet. Panic and fear when in the next moment another is rolling down the stairs, and lands on his face and, yes, is now bleeding from nose and mouth. Disappointment and frustration when they disobey for the 14th time in the last half hour, and pride when they finally remember—even once—to think before they act.
I want to film these moments of pride, frustration, joy and fear but doing so will take a lot of footage. Spontaneity will only occur if the kids are no longer fixated on the camera that is filming them. But, I am not worried that there will not be material. That is the other part of the aesthetic: it is cyclical and therefore predictable.

Again, this verse chorus verse motif…

I want to do a piece chronicling a day in domestic life—the natural, rhythm of it.  I have also wanted to do a piece where my kids are the focal point.  So the idea for my video centers on catching my kids doing what they do best, sleeping, eating, going potty, blowing their nose, watching tv, crying, whining, playing, reading, bathing, and finally sleeping again.  I want this to be set to a simple tune—one composed and played live by me.  The tune is important because it represents both struggle/chaos and order.  Composition, like child raising, is a messy process.  But the products are often beautiful and ordered: verse, chorus, bridge, verse. 

A few potential problems.  Can I rip the audio from a clip to be used as the background music of the other clips?  I think I can, but this might be a difficult sync to manage at the beginning.  Will I have to play “rock video” and fake play along with my own real playing? 

I want the video to be short (3 minutes max).  Is that enough time to get the clips I want?  I am going to try to limit each shot to 10 seconds—so that is roughly 18 clips.  Is that enough? 

I’m working on getting something up here today, though it will probably not be video.  I am hoping to have some sort of outline/script for my video here and would like to experiment with some storyboards which I will scan tomorrow when I get back to school.

For now, enjoy this brilliant short film I came across today: A backwards love story.

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=hsF0Eqs8yQ8]