Train Addendum

Rough reel-
TrainRough.mov

Western Revision

Throughout this story there are “flashes” of jail bars opening in darkness to reveal another closed cell. This is a fantastical symbolic reference. The main character can’t get out of the civilization that holds him captive. There is some sense of confinement that the main character battles mentally.

Jail bars open to light. A man wakes up and goes outside to sees a wagon trail leaving town far off in the distance. The town is empty. There are few traces as to why the town is deserted except for signs of fresh graves in the cemetery, destruction, and neglect- blood splattered on a wall. He enters a church and prays for help and forgiveness. As he exits there is a mirror, which he looks into. The darkness mixed with the flickering candle light shows his true/darker complexion. The past of his wickedness sets in with a brief flashback of murder, corruption, and chaos to the town. When he steps out of the church there is a law-man waiting on him. Of course, there is a standoff between the two men. The showdown ends with the wicked man shot. The next scene opens and the law-man is looking at the other through bars. He is stringing a noose. Through the window, a carriage and some people walk by. The bars close a last time.

Addendum to Train...

Original post.

Notes from 7/10:
Additions-
+Heartbeat as overriding theme.
-Heartbeat transitions to train track thuds/passing shadows to heartbeat again.
-Train continually slows until it squeals to a stop at the point of death.

Possible additions-
+The train as a lifetime allegory. (original- mortality allegory)
-Moving from car to car, with doors locking behind.
-Virgil(AKA Death) showing up in closer and closer seats.
+The characters only communicating on heart/track beats.
+Train whistle as flatline noise?

"'Look! Here is Dis, and this the place where you
will have to arm yourself with fortitude.'
O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then- I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death."
-Dante Alighieri

Pending-
+Style studies (7/12)
+Amended storyreel (7/15)

Diner Story Idea

In the early morning hours (4-5AM) a small diner located beneath a train track is empty except for the burly short order cook who is slowly wiping down the counter top. The lights in the diner begin to flicker as an passing train shakes everything that is not bolted down. After the train passes a short hobo with a flushed face and tattered clothes enters the diner. The hobo walks up to the bar, sits down and motions to the cook that he would like some coffee. In an irritated manner the cook points to the marquee where the price, 5 cents, is listed as the cost for coffee. The hobo smiles awkwardly and begins to dig in his pockets hastily. The hobo places the contents of his pocket on the table and begins to push each penny toward the cook. However after the third penny the hobo tries to pass off a couple buttons as pennies. This is quite obvious to the cook who scorns the hobo with a look of frustration, but the hobo returns to searching in his pocket for some other item to exchange. As the situation looks more and more futile, a beautiful female waitress enters the diner. She is early for shift change. Immediately the expression on the cooks face softens as he ogles her. She sits down softly in a booth and picks up a paper lying near by. As the cook falls into a trance, it becomes obvious to the hobo that there is a connection between the waitress and the cook that has yet to be explored and an opportunity for him to facilitate. While the cook rests his head in his hand leaning on the bar, the hobo slowly reaches up and plucks the cooks hat off his head. The cook is jolted out of his daze and begins to scold the hobo, but the hobo gestures to the cook to go over and sit with her. Eventually the cook hands over his apron and sheepishly moves over to the table and asks to sit down. The jolly little hobo trots over to the table and serves each one of them a hot fresh cup of coffee. As we watch the waitress and the cook begin to have playful banter, the camera pulls back to reveal the hobo quietly and happily sipping a cup of hot coffee.

Western Short

Okay there are a couple 3D westerns out there after all. One of them is surprisingly like the 'John Hu Samurai Cowboy' pitch, but thats for you guys to decide. Its name is "Los Gringos" the the architectural style and setting is much what I had envisioned for this western idea, although it can be pushed a few different ways. There is even a 3D spaghetti western parady (it was pretty good, although a lot of its pizazz is in the credits).





I've been kicking around a few other scenarios that seemed to help push some of the ideas of the old west:
1- A young man waits in the upstairs of a saloon. The room is somewhat humming and vibrates from the noise and drunken debauchery below as muffled piano music and loud crude yells of laughter fill the upstairs hotel suite. He stares into his pocket watch which not only is giving him the time, but reveals the tin-type of his wife. He envisions his wife sitting by the fire knitting. The room is calm and harm from the fire with a cooking pot brewing. Back to the man in the saloon, the hum from below breaks the calm of the flashback. Two people, a man and a woman, clatter laughingly as they can be heard coming towards the room. The young man nervously moves to the corner of the room positioning himself. The door breaks open with an rough older looking man shocked to see who is in the room. The call girl gives off a scream and runs back down the hall. The young man raises his gun just as another flashback cuts in. The wife is in the room knitting and door breaks open to cabin and the rough looking man enters. She gives a horrified scream. Flash foreword- the young man pauses and then painfully pulls the trigger. The point of view is now from the call girl, nervously looking from the stairwell. The young man slowly walks out of the room and down the stairs with an unsatisfied look on his face. As he passes the call girl he drops a pouch of money on the floor next to her. The music and laughter downstairs is still loud- masking the violence that occured above.

This is obviously a subtle revenge piece that is intended to tribute the calm frontier of the west against the not yet civilized wild, and in some cases, lawless saloon crowd that ran rampant during this period of time.

The next piece isn't nearly as worked out as the first.
2- A law officer is forced to uphold the law when a mob comes to the sheriffs quarters one evening. They want to lynch this ruthless killer confined the back jail room. The sheriff has to struggle between the law of the land and the law of the wild west- which can be very conflicting perceptions. Before mob arrives his relationship with the prisoner is shown to be negative. The prisoner is a snake that deserves to die, but somehow is only imprisoned do to court complications. The underlying theme is: 'what is true justice'. After some research, mobs typically overthrew prisoners to preform lynchings under their own code of regulation.

Appalachain Project

Here are some early renders of props for the Appalachain project. Beyond the modeling, I am playing with image based lighting using HDR images to get a realistic lighting setup that we can actually capture from the environment we will be filming in.

The Red House on Grey Road (and similar ideas)

This story is inspired by the poem, "Casas enfiladas" by Alfonsina Storni:

Casas enfiladas, casas enfiladas,

casas enfiladas.

Cuadrados, cuadrados, cuadrados.

Casas enfiladas.

Las gentes ya tienen el alma cuadrada,

ideas enfila

y angulo en la espalda.

Yo misma he vertido ayer una lágrima,

Dios mio, cuadrada.

Translated as:

Houses in a line, in a line,

In a line there,

Squares, squares, squares,

Even people now have square souls,

Ideas in file, I declare,

And on their shoulders, angles wear.

Just yesterday I shed a tear and it

Oh, God, was square!

Literature scholar Sidonia Rosenbaum refers to the poem as a forceful and poignant interpretation of modern city life, with its piercing loneliness, its chilling indifference, its soulless uniformity and maddening monotony, its spiritual vacuity, its unending vulgarity…which rots and perplexes the soul…The same mathematical impersonality of the houses in rows, in angles, in squares, is reflected in their souls, in their ideas, in their very physical outlines and even…in her own tears

As a HUGE oversimplification, the poem, to me, is about conformity. Obviously my idea needs further development--the narrative is pretty weak as is--but the poem lends itself to some exciting visual interpretations that should be teased out. Here is my knee jerk reaction:

(verses of the poem are heard at appropriate times throughout the short film)

Inside a modern home a man is watching TV. From a point of view from behind the TV set, we see him flipping through channels listlessly. We catch snipits of audio clips of what he hears. "…now there’s a quick and easy way to lose 50 pounds in just two weeks!.." "gas prices reached an all time high today…" "want to look like your favorite celebrity? Now you can…"etc. (the point here is to convey that he is saturated in pop culture BS and news spin).

Frustrated, the man gets up and walks out his door. The streets are lined with many different colored, two-story houses (think suburbia). No one is around, but the sound and glow of a television can be seen coming from the windows of each home he passes. He continues to walk, passing one empty yard after another, when something causes him to stop. We see him from a profile shot. He is standing in the middle of the street. A house is behind him. The focus is on him, and the house behind is blurrily out of focus. As he stands there, the focus shifts to the house. It suddenly—instantly—loses its color and becomes stark grey. Shocked, he looks around. Another house loses its color. A pause. Then another. Pause. Another.

A great camera pan from the sky shows the street lined with houses. Many are colored. Some are nothing but grey. Another of the houses suddenly loses its color, becoming a dull grey in an instant. Shortly thereafter, another house does the same thing. Then another. And another. All the while the time between houses losing their color is getting shorter and shorter. Cutting to a street level view facing only one side of the street, we zoom quickly down the road. Our character is running back to his home, trying to outrun the chain reaction of homes losing their color; as he runs, houses whiz by in the background, losing their color one by one. He finally reaches his house and dives inside, slamming the door. The rush of color loss skips his house, but the chain reaction continues down the row with the next house beside him and so on.

Zooming out we see this red house is the lone splash of color in our suburban hell. Cutting to a close up shot of our character looking desperately out his window, a tear begins to well up in his eye. As it is about to fall, his home instantly loses its color. We still hear the TV droning in the background and see its flashing lights illuminate the room behind him. His tear drops, but it falls to the ground as a cube

******************************************************************************************************************

I was looking through some of my old writings and found this piece of freewriting from years ago. Another seed for a story.

Every man needs some sort of inspiration. A muse, if you will. I am a firm believer that we all have it embedded somewhere inside of us. It is the genius, however, that is able to bring it out, to turn himself inside out and give us that unique view from within. And even then, we cannot comprehend it. The genius exposes himself for us to see. But we can only postulate, make guesses at the true meaning of their art. Our minds can only see things in three dimensions while the levels of their imaginations are infinite. So we look on in wonder, but are never truly aware of the real significance of the work. That secret knowledge lies locked away in the mind of the creator, the genius, while we, the humble masses are left confused and dumbfounded.

Conformity, I felt, would become self-expression, and complacency, inspiration. With this knowledge, I felt I could restore inspiration back into this otherwise bland world.

Our world is quite uninspired. Quite boring.

They arrested me once for sculpting. Twice for painting, and four times for creative writing. My work was seized and destroyed on the spot. Thankfully they didn’t find my hidden gallery in the cellar. I was put in prison for a total of twelve years where I sat in a cell and almost withered away. They air in their prison seemed to suck the life out of me. The walls were cold and gray. The walkways were formed in a perfect grid of parallel lines. The people there were removed and complacent, never showing any signs of identity. Our uniforms were white. The guards dressed in all black. Everyone’s head was shaved taking away from us the only luxury of self expression allowed to us in the outside world.

Understand that the anguish you experience in a place like that isn’t physical. It’s mental torture. They whittle you away with idleness until you’re nothing. They rot your brain away with disuse so that when you get out you fit back into the system without any resistance. They bend your will to theirs and force it upon you until the day you die. You might as well be dead. You concede life and accept existence.

But I got out. I did not concede.

Mirrors and Mannequins (working title)

Normal mannequin and plus sized mannequin:



This is the basic plot of my idea so far: (UPDATED as of 7/10/08)

The setting of the story is a warehouse. A large wooden box is delivered to the warehouse by handtruck and left in the center of the room. The camera has been close to the ground so far so that you can only see the feet and legs of the delivery man as it follows him to the center of the room. When the delivery man leaves, most of the lights are turned off except for one spotlight on the box. The camera zooms out a little bit but remains close to the ground so that the shot is framed by the legs of the mannequins in the warehouse. A plus sized mannequin steps out of the box and starts to look around. She walks up to a mannequin directly in front of her and looks it over. She then walks along the row of mannequins and you can see their reflections in the large mirror along the wall. She begins to realize she's different from the others. At the end of the row she sees a knife lying on the ground. She picks it up and walks over to face the mirror. She begins to whittle pieces of herself away so that she can look like the others. The whittling visibly causes her pain but she becomes addicted to the immediate results she sees in the mirror. Eventually she whittles herself away so much that her limbs become like toothpicks and her legs start to shake under her. She falls down on one knee but her reflection remains standing and looks intact. However, the plus-sized mannequin is still not satisfied with her reflection and realizes that the only way she can truly be like the others is to cut off her head. She does so and her body crumbles to the ground. The camera then moves away from filming only the reflections of the figures in the room to actually showing them in reality and you can see they too are missing limbs and covered gashes and grime.

Here is a rough story reel of what was just described:
http://www.fx.clemson.edu/~atriple/860/storyreel1.mov

Here are some source images for the setting: