15/07/2016

FINALLY!

...finished the last movie. Soundtrack still to come but it feels like a big achievement. The big deal with this one was finding the right ending - needing to show passage of time without resorting to cliches or making it take too long...finally realised the point was that the story was - kind of - cyclic, so the obvious way to end it was by echoing the scenes at the beginning. In fact the narrative changed a lot in the attempt to balance "the story" with the right visuals, images I wanted to show, (just because I liked them) and trying to encapsulate a thought in an image in the most effective way. So it isn't literally cyclic any more; but doesn't need to be. The sense of future and the desirability of repeated events is there...well, I hope so. This particular story presented quite a challenge - but that's why they call it research.

12/07/2016

Thinking space


Holiday season...and the power of walking miles staring at mountains, lakes, fields, islands to generate new ideas for films. Emptying your head, disconnecting from the internet, the TV, the press for two whole weeks and listening to the stories floating quietly on the wind. Then coming "home" - to a temporary cottage and drawing them out; making visual notes. Is this a cliche?...It's not about "unwinding" but about creating a space for creative inspiration to happen. Sometimes, your head is full - of anxiety about referendums and governments - of is-that-damp-in-the-living-room-spreading, of friends and family in need of support, of timetables and workloads and oh yeah, of TV. News news news news crap crap distraction .
There are lots of ways that we get "inspiration" - drawing, reading stories, watching other people's animations, outrage and determination to tell the world something, experimenting,(which is just a posh word for playing with ideas)... but my favourite is this, sitting on the thinking stone halfway up the mountain and letting all those things mix and mature until an idea evolves from them.