The simultaneously best and worst thing about the final year is that it brings everything you've done so far into focus. You realise how far you've come in such a relatively short time, but you also realise in which ways you still haven't gotten up to snuff yet, and now you have the looming threat of the big wide world out there to worry about.
In my case, it's been a time of complete upheaval in my practice, exploring new avenues I'd never even considered before. I started off on the Level 0 course with a little practicing of drawing because I knew I'd need those skills in a limited capacity for storyboarding. As it turned out, that would run parallel with my love for animation into a complete change in specialism. Although my skills back then seem antiquated now, at the time my specialism was in editing. You can chart my steady progress from standard film-making to experimentation with computer art to dipping my toe in full-blown animation over the years.
This year, I have only vague intentions. I want to prepare more fully for a project that has been in the planning stages since 2009, which seems like an eternity ago, and to that end am working on ideas related to it for my dissertation. I have been creating visual pieces in my spare time as practice for when it comes time to actually begin creating the animation models for it.
However, I don't want to focus entirely on the technical aspects of my practice. I've seen it happen before when a popular creator is so focused on a project technically that they forget to apply any effort to it creatively, which is the reason you're watching it. An excellent production of a boring script is still going to be boring, unless there's some sort of miracle like Star Wars, Titanic or The Wizard of Oz.
To that end, I want to create something that isn't 'thrown together' in pre-production. Too often I've rushed through the creative stage of a production just to get to the production itself, since it's the final production that gets the marks. It's even compromised a few modules. Both the ending of the final term piece for Level 0, When Worlds Unite, and the entirety of the final term piece for FD Year One, The Night Shift, were lacking in the scripting and performance areas respectively.
So, my initial concept for the three ideas was to focus on the screenplay aspect, arriving at a final polished draft rather than simply throwing another script together so we can start work on a final product and cross our fingers hoping it works out. However, this concept does have the downside of not resulting in a final piece I can show off to the same extent that a film piece would. You could write the best screenplay in the world, and even get fantastic actors to do a readthrough that you film and present as your final piece, it still will never be as impactful or impressive as just making and showing a movie. Plus, the enormous lead time on the project, many months of which will involve no other module besides this one, means that it may be possible, or even better, to try and 'go for it'.
But that is not an assured thing yet. While it would make for a better end product that I can show and have available to show off as I enter the world of actual employment (or commissioning in between bouts of starvation, as is often the case with creative practitioners), there's still the question of how to realise it. I doubt I could convince anyone to assist me with creating the film, and while I've made something of a name for myself by constantly making weird products as a result of figuring out new and inventive ways of getting around the fact that I'm on my own with not nearly the range of skills needed to pull off the one-man-band approach, this is a whole new level and I'm not sure I can rise to it by continuing the charade.
On the other hand, that's still to be decided. It's early days yet, and there's still time to figure out how this year is going to proceed. For now, here are my three ideas for the big CPR project, and descriptive working titles that reflect the content, but wouldn't actually be used as the actual title.
IDEA 1 - "WHEN WORLDS UNITE 2"
I've linked to this Level 0 film above, and touched upon the ways I am dissatisfied with it. Although it represented a massive step up in my development technically, and I am satisfied with the bulk of the film creatively, the ending scene is still nigh-unwatchable for me. I had no idea how to end the film, just threw together some shitty dialogue that largely ignored the returning characters and focused on the bland, undeveloped conflict between the new characters (although the female geometric character does get some nice moments of comedy and does actually show some character traits in the final scene, which is more than the rest of the heroes get there).
That said, the concept of a big crossover has always fascinated me. Thus, I've always had the random idea in the back of my head of "what if I did a sequel/remake incorporating characters from the films that have come since". Of the films that I've done since then, the usable characters created from them consist of the supernatural being that originated with my Interview Project but fully developed in A Stranger Being, the silent protagonist of Slenderfan, and perhaps even the characters from the world of the second idea, representing the future while the new returning characters represent the present, and the characters coming back from the first film representing the past. It would be a difficult task to establish all these characters for people not familiar with the films these characters originated from (who make up almost all of the audience), and I'm not sure I'd use all the characters available, but it would not only be an interesting challenge to create an engaging story based around a large cast of pre-established characters no-one's ever heard of in such a short running time as 15 minutes, but it could conceivably be done in time for the deadline by myself.
IDEA 2 - "TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR MIND"
Originally this idea was going to be the basis of my Consolidation project last year, but was scrapped at the eleventh hour and replaced with a far more simple and economical project when it became clear it would take too long to prepare a solid foundation for the short test I would produce for that module. Now though, I feel that at the very least I could produce a solid screenplay, perhaps even a feature length one, or if circumstances change and I miraculously gain a crew and a cast, produce it as a 15 minute short.
The idea of the thing is to explore the creative process of writing through making it exterior. Instead of having the protagonist, a writer, have arguments in their own head over ideas and whether that line of dialogue was good enough or if this story beat will come off as stupid and so on, the arguments are taking place with the characters themselves. It's a standard 'extremely unusual scenario presented as real' set-up, perhaps even interspersed with the almost required mockumentary style interviews and talking heads. It has the most creative potential of the three, since it not only presents the opportunity to play with the setting and tell the very commercial jokes with real people reacting to the fictional characters (maybe rendered with animation, maybe not) wandering about and hilarity ensues, but also a rather dramatic one with exploring how creative people can become isolated to the point of no return, trapped inside their own head, unable or even unwilling to escape, and how difficult, stressful and draining the creative process is. It could even touch upon rather dark ideas like the trend of never being happy with your work, often hating your works-in-progress and even what happens when all the pressure causes you to snap. It was partially inspired by Doug Walker's The Review Must Go On, which, while aimed more at comedy than drama, also played with the metatextual ideas of how creative projects can consume you and the frustrations of creating something. That interplay of drama and comedy is something that would be hard to pull off, and thus creatively invigorating.
IDEA 3 - "INTERGALACTIC NERDS"
Originally planned as an extracurricular film but largely abandoned by how much time college work eats up, this is an idea I wanted to do as an animation test. It is based around characters created by the actors, namely various students of this class past and present, as a way to get around the fact that many have no acting experience, so they inform me of what they want to and can play, and I work to that.
The concept of the film is to test the waters of not only full-blown animation in a far bigger way than my Consolidation film, but also the kind of world the project I mentioned at the beginning of this post will inhabit. Conceived as a look into the workings of the universe created by low-grade science fiction films, it will be about swapping foreground with background. Often in these sorts of films there's almost no thought put into the universe the story inhabits, the producers just want something that superficially looks like a more popular work that they can slap on a VHS and put out in rental stores. Thus, the not-Luke Skywalkers and not-Terminators inhabit bizarre, nonsensical realms where aliens all speak English and have no discernible culture of their own, yet are fully aware of Earth culture for no reason. The film would follow these background characters and explore why they act like this. Are they like Native Americans, forced to speak the language and know the culture of their invading conquerers? Is it just a show for tourists? Do they just enjoy human culture and are looked down upon by their own races for doing so? The film would be set in a Star Wars-style cantina, because every cheapo space opera movie tries to have its own Star Wars-style cantina, and instead of following the bland knock-offs and their low-grade adventures, they're just cameos wandering in and out of the story we follow, the day-in-the-life story of the aliens and robots we'd usually see in the background of such movies. Imagine Clerks in space, and you'll have a pretty good idea of it.
IDEA 4 - "THE NIGHT SHIFT"
Put here more as a 'might as well' inclusion rather than a serious idea, another idea I had that would be interesting would be to re-visit what I consider my biggest failure to date, the Year One film The Night Shift. An okay script absolutely wrecked by directorial incompetence, a rushed production, unprepared non-actors in every role and abysmal editing, it would be interesting to create what I originally intended for the film in animation, playing the remake then the original back-to-back as an illustration of how butchered something can be in the process of being realised.
So, that's the future. For now, here is my RED1 film, showing my art and design methods off in a new format I haven't explored before, infographics.
The Big Picture Re-Visualised from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.
No comments:
Post a Comment