"Permit yourself to flow and overflow. Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess."
Anais NiN
....well its been quite a long weekend with not much rest at all...but its been fucking great....we entered the 24 hour film festival, and it was quite an interesting experience...basically we had 24 hours to come up with a 7 minute short film incorporating five items the organisers give you at his briefing-type deal.....
....we kinda got tangled up in a web for a couple hours after all trying to fuse ideas for the narrative and style of film we wanted to go for...we wanted to go for some kind of mixture of Lynchian weirdness, indie/Jarmusch- like talking and characterisations, whilst incorporating a surreal dreamy element to it; abundant with visual metaphors and a non-linear narrative...
...we worked throughout the night and into the morning...because it had to be in-camera edited it was quite frustrating in that we had to have the structure nailed down, and if one thing went wrong you had to re-do everything!!!... the whole experience was much like an acid trip, with everything going in waves, sometimes we were in a kaleidoscopic spin with so many tangents being possible and other times we were on a beautiful plain of creativity all working together seeing visual metaphors and connections appearing everywhere...our actor was great and really had some brilliant ideas and pulled us out of the quicksand of frustration when batteries started running out, tiredness crept in, and the overflow of drunk moron's littered around the streets, spitting and blubbering wanting to know what the hell was going on started to do my head in!!
...I was quite stoked with the end product... complete with an original score and voice-over..it came out really well, basically consisted of one man's ascension from feelings of entrapment, isolation and alienation in the city to one of re-assurance and hope through a twisted journey through Hamilton city and encounters with an array of kooky characters each offering musings on life.my Gothic friend dressed up in a full body-sock and juggled in the middle of a Japanese-themed gardenit was quite a siteespecially to on-lookers, all with confused expressions plastered on their faces and inquisitive children who werent afraid to question the gender of this weird-amphibian like creature in the garden!!
they had an awards evening last night, which was quite entertaining, they picked the top 10 short films and screened them and proceeded to hand out awards for different categoriesone thing about the whole deal that bugged me was that it was sponsored by some many mainstream outfits and I was afraid it was the councils secret agenda to award the films the best promoted our city in a shimmering and positive light and not award films on their artistic merit.our didnt make it to the top ten and I was informed at the after-party that the judges had pondered over it for a while deeming it too controversial to be included with the others that were quite different from ours in that they were nice-genre fitting films, whilst ours was a visual odyssey into darker realms with the dialogue encouraging people not to let society fuck them up the ass and the narrative in a deliberate dreamy non-linear style
anyway I wasnt concerned with winning, if anything it has kicked my creativity back into gear and has been quite a trippy experience and im quite proud of a film with made in 24 hours with only in-camera editing!.....I really need to start work on my next filmic project once I get a cameraalmost got enough dosh!!
here is some stills from our 24 hour effort
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Yevgeny Zamyatin(1884-1937). I have to do my reading now and it's almost one am and got to be up early, so that's all for now...
[Edited on Sep 28, 2004 12:44AM]