Knight at the Circus – Exhibited film (& discussion)

Knight at the Circus [exhibited 2012]

Goodness. It’s finally here. Meant to upload this last week, but time did its thing. This was shown at the Kingston Fine Art Degree Show in a darkened room with a bench to encourage people to sit and watch it in its entirety. It could have done with not being near something with flickering lights, but when space is at a premium, I think I fared well. (Note on audio: music is by a band called Minotaur Shock.)

In contrast to the text only version, this also has sound and visuals, which I had great fun with. In typical style much was done rather last minute and I’d have liked to have a few days extra to poke about with it when seeing what the tv screen had done to both the colour and the sound (by the end of the fortnight, the colours had ramped up, burned and highly saturated. Similarly, the volume balance didn’t seem to come across well, with the humming at the end far louder than the rest of the piece (unlike the file!) so that I had to turn it down and thus lost nuance. Which is a little annoying, but possibly brought on by myself.

Where can I go from here? I want to play with it some more. See if I can perhaps do a text with effects version (as I was happy with those portions of the film and wanted to experiment). I also want to consider working on making an illustrated book. Which in itself holds challenges as I do not want one of my goals to be constrained and thus destroyed by the medium: I want things to look fragmentary, I want people to fill in the rest of the world and want to know the rest of the story. Perhaps large swathes of blank might do it? With eroded text. It would certainly fit with some of my earlier work.

Which reminds me, I want to go through this site and put up some of the old work I am still proud of. So little of it still exists so it’d be nice to get a relatively decent online portfolio.

Also, have sorted out going to the Fringe this year, which should be great fun. Will I review there? I’m not actually sure, but I’ve some previews I saw last week that I’ve got to write up. Initial picks to rec are definitely: Lucy Ayrton’s Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry and Superbard Starts to Save the World. If you’re up there, definitely pop in (they’re free!).

Update: Knight Errant – Text draft (silent)

Put together a (mute) version of the story.
Are intertitle stories engaging? Is it simply TL;DR?
Did you lose interest half way through, did you sit at the end, wishing I had continued?
Are llamas red?
Inquiring minds must know! (Not about the llamas, I’m ok on that).

Knight at the Circus – Mute Text version (Work in Progress) from Pinstripeowl on Vimeo.

Feet in the Sky (status update)

Playground: lounging in the air

Just a quick status update to say things are happening. Experimenting with multiple screens and simultaneous narratives. Will update soon, particularly with a post about London that I’ve been planning.

Night Owls and Music Halls

Oh I do seem to work best when the world is silent ‘cept for skitters and the odd animal yowl. It’s at that time that my brain lets loose the energy it needed distractions to help build up, like going into gear from an enforced neutral.

Today I am going to make a quiet film: using the story as narrative over waves and footage I shot in Leigh. I was thinking about Derek Jarman’s Blue the other day and want to see if that would work for something less contemplative and with dialogue.

If all else fails, it might just turn into a narration from Bagpuss.

–

On Saturday I was at Wilton’s Music Hall for the Hammer and Tongue Poetry Slam Final (will link to review once it’s up). The building is beautiful, all the more so for its unassuming façade hidden away in a back alley off Whitechapel. It’s the oldest music hall in the world, apparently, and the last functioning one. I’d like to see other events there and bask in the life the place has yet.

Wilton's Music Hall, taken from the side of the main hall, facing away from the stage.

Trapped Cameras

When working on storyboards I’m always reminded that cameras do not function like a theatre audience. Cameras can and should move: they should allow the viewer to be personally engrossed in the world built by your film’s narrative. Iwrote about this, in a dissertation no less, so you think it’d be clearer when sketching out how the shots will look. And yet it isn’t: scenes are defined by their actions rather than what we see. Some evaluation is in order.

And yet, is a subjective camera appropriate for an ostensibly conventional fairy tale, albeit one that revels in story-telling? Would setting the scene in a way to suggest other perspectives are possible? Or perhaps having a perspective in the initial moment would help make the difference between the later stories more acute. Certainly a camera bound by the island would solidify their helplessness at the absence of the wind. Of course, there are row-boats, but they’re not feasible for longer distances. Having the camera stuck on the island, looking forlornly out as the boats of their hopes for survival diminish into the distance would be a more effective image.

Dragos Asaftei - Photograph of young girl setting off a lantern in Romania

Knight at the Circus (Status Update)

At the moment my work centres around a story of a Knight sent to search for the North Wind. Having found a floating circus he asks its denizens for their take on how to capture such an entity. Acrobats, knife throwers and animal tamers each have their own mythology, steeped in their own disciplines: suggestions are given from the pinnacle of their crafts.

Today I shall finalise my storyboard for the boats leaving the home island. They’re few, but scattered, lit by a small, warm light in the darkness of the still waters.

Preliminary experiments with paper boats