The Scramble for Ideas
Going into fourth year I've been trying to come up with a film idea that I will remain passionate about through the whole year, which has been a little tricky as i am putting a lot of pressure on it. I know that it's an option to make more than one film but I've never had the opportunity to spend so much time and effort on one piece and I feel like it's the best choice for me.
[Initial Mind Map]
My initial ideas were:
1. A love story between the Sun and the Moon
This was following on from a year 2 project, World in a Room, where I had two characters separated by one door, and they were the Sun and Moon. At the time Alan had suggested I could keep hold of the idea for a final year film so I decided to think on it a bit. I came up with some character designs, very inspired by Sha Sha Higby and masks, which I really liked and thought would look interesting as puppets. Apart from this, though, I didn't come up with a storyline that was both compelling and fit to a short film.
[Work by Sha Sha Higby]
[My Sketches of the Sun and Moon Characters]
2. An adaptation of East of the Sun, West of the Moon
East of the Sun, West of the Moon is a fairytale that I really enjoy, it plays with thee Beauty and the Beast notion of a human trapped in the form of a beast, or in this case, a polar bear. I love bears, as I think they're made out of the best shapes, so this was an incentive to this story as well as all the beautiful icy imagery I could get in there. It also ties really nicely into my dissertation which was originally going to focus on monster/human relationships on media and how they are more open to queer interpretation. I watched Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête for this and I loved the soft focus and starry lighting and thought that adding this effect to the fairytale could be really enchanting.
It's a long fairytale, I thought that I could make a version of it that had a narrated prologue that covered more of the narrative in a small amount of time for me to go into the bits of the story I most enjoy. As I went over this I realised that I would be making something I didn't enjoy, though, as I love the original fairytale so much it would just end up in me being disappointed in my final product. Ultimately I decided to ditch this idea because of that.
[Book cover, Theatre Puppets, and my own sketches]
The Internal Pitch
As I abandoned both of these ideas, another that I had considered a while ago but not developed upon turned up as a replacement: Church Grims. Church Grims come from the old belief that the first soul buried in a graveyard would remain there t guide all following souls to the afterlife, and to prevent this fate from falling on a human soul, communities would bury animals instead. This could range from horses to sheep, but more often than not it was a dog. Church Grims are one of the many black dog legends that exist in the UK and Scandinavia, and it has always interested me as one of the more kindly black dogs, even if still an omen of death. Black dog legends are also quite special to me as Norfolk/East Anglia, where I grew up, has a massive amount of black dog lore, most famously Black Shuck and the Black Dog of Bungay, both are demonic dogs that prophesies death for their viewers. There is also a Norfolk folklore zine that I like called Shuck (after Black Shuck), and its first issue has a lot about its namesake due to his legendary status. His mythic status goes so far as to when the skeleton of a supposedly 7 foot dog was dug up at Leiston Abbey there were rumours it could be the very bones of Black Shuck himself.
[Research Points]
[My Sketches]
I had this idea a week before the internal pitch so had to quickly think up some sort of plot to present, as well as create some images to convey it. Here's the powerpoint I ended up making:
The story follows a hospital patient who discovers they're dead but doesn't want to go and Shuck, who wants to get them to the afterlife. A woods begins to grow out of the walls of the hospital to block the patient from their life, and they make an attempt to fight the branches and brambles. At the end the patient sees themselves flatline in an outer-body experience and finally accepts the dog's guidance. Once they're through Shuck is left alone in the corridor, contemplating their passing, until turning around and entering a new door for another patient.
I've been making some fabrication tests of Shuck, playing with different head shapes and different ways to fluff them up. So far I've made four clay heads and fluffed two of them up, with one restarted as the initial test was a failure.
[Original Sculpts]
[Two Final Fabricated Shuck Heads and Development]
I like the grey shuck most at the moment, made it using unwound wool and I think it makes a really good scraggly effect.The frayed one does have promise, though, I just used the fabric I had around to test the style, and the only colour I had with the right texture was green, and I didn't have thread to match, so it looks sort of happily messy. I would need the eyes to be further up for this to work, as the frayed edges of the nose block the eyes when front-on, so I drew up a vague idea of what it would look like with alterations in photoshop- including higher eyes and black fabric.
Research and Inspirations
My plot was good enough for a week's thought but it doesn't really feel like me, I'm not passionate or interested in the characters, and compared to the other pitches I felt like it was pretty bland and predictable. The pitches I enjoyed the most were those that felt 'weird' and played with expectations and design, so I'd quite like to 'weird'-ify the Church Grim. I like the idea of audiences watching a film I make and thinking that was weird but beautiful, because those are some of my favourite watching experiences.
To help inspire me I've been watching a few films, starting with a couple of short films including Moon Breath Beat, Harpya, and Oh Willy... . Moon Breath Beat by Lisze Bechtold was introduced to me by Moira as one of her favourite animations of all time, it's about the loss and regain of creativity, shown through the connection between the animator, her cats and nature (birds, trees, the moon), and all of it staggers perfectly the soundtrack and sound effects. I don't think it will filter into my own film strongly but it was nice to watch as a reminder that narrative doesn't have to be the main focus of a film and it can still make an impact. The viewer feels the animation rather than being told an exact story through it.
Harpya by Raoul Servais is a pixelated film about a man who saves a harpy from being drowned only to find out that she has such an appetite that she will never let those around her eat. It's a really strange film, visually it looks much older than it is, mimicking old silent films with drawn and photographed backgrounds and a hazy focus, when it was actually made in the 70s. The sound effects are also really fun, whenever the man walks along his shoes squeak like balloons and the harpy makes a really horrible screeching sound halfway between a woman and a bird. It was absolutely bizarre, but the visuals were really interesting, especially the composition of the harpy leant over the dinner table of the man.
Oh Willy..., was probably my favourite of the three, and was another that came recommended by Moira. It's by Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, known for their beautiful felted stop-motion films. I had watched their episode of The House on Netflix, and was probably my favourite one of all three, and had read about this film, but never watched it. It's basically about grieving and wanting to return to the comfort of childhood and maternal love, but set in a nudist community that a clothed son has to return to in order to say goodbye to his mother. It goes on a wild journey when he falls down a hill and hits his head, and ends up with his being cared for by a massive furry and orange ape-like creature, that when he snips away the hair of its face, turns out to just have a normal human face, and it goes on to breast feed him. It's really really strange but so fun to watch, and the animation is absolutely incredible.
I have also watched the feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I enjoyed this film, although it's not the sort I usually watch as it was pretty slow paced. It follows a family of two who join Uncle Boonmee in his house in the countryside to help him through an illness. It is expected that he will recover soon with the correct treatment, but one night over dinner the ghost of his wife, and one of the guest's sisters, appears at the table with them, who says she knows he's ill. At the same meal a hairy forest spirit joins them, and reveals that he their son who went missing years ago after she died to join the ghost monkeys. He returns because he, like all creatures in the forest, can sense his father's illness. It is a bizarre and surprisingly gentle film about how family interacts and copes with loss. I liked the magic that the forest brought, even if subtly, the ghost monkeys moving silently through, and the final journey that Boonmee takes before allowing the ghost of his wife to remove the drainage tube from his kidney in the room of a cave. The whole family takes this journey with him, like they all join in the walk to the afterlife, but just to send him off and say goodbye at the station, rather than go the full journey.
I was also really attracted to a side story of a princess travelling through the forest with her attendants, who stops by a waterfall and has a conversation with a catfish. The catfish tells her that she is beautiful despite what she thinks of herself. The catfish appears to be some sort of water spirit, as he can talk, and the princess wades in, removing layers of clothes and jewellery into the water as an offering to him. She wants beauty in exchange for it, but her story ends up as a sex scene where she floats in the water and a catfish writhes around between her legs. Obviously, it is not what I expected at all, but I've been reading up on fantastical/monstrous relationships and sex for my dissertation (which is on the reclaiming of the monstrous queer in film and tv) so I sort of watched it through a fairytale lens, and as the filming was the same gentle way it had been through the whole of the film it was weirdly enchanting. Again, weird, but beautiful.
So in summary I want some of that good and enchanting weirdness in my own film. I am considering having the film more about the journey to the afterlife rather than the resistance, as I feel like that's pretty predictable. Could be fun to have it set in a semi-magical forest like in Uncle Boonmee, and I love fairytales and folklore so I could consider these aspects more, as it's what I'm passionate about. I'm most interested in the dog and the lore behind him so why don't I focus on him and his story more? I've been considering having dialogue between the dead and the dog, but in a very normal conversational way, to sort of estrange itself from the unnatural situation. I keep thinking of how Death acts and talks in the Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett, and how likeable yet deep his character is.
I also just finished Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and absolutely adored it, her interpretations of fairytales are so dark and hopeful at the same time, you can fully understand the characters in such few pages. The last few stories were adaptions of Red Riding Hood, and all included some form of werewolf, except for Wolf Alice, which included a feral child who was raised by wolves, and combine elements of Red Riding Hood and Alice Through the Looking Glass. I loved all of these wolf-y tales and has got me thinking about the possibility of just exploring all the dog mythology and lore I can get my hands on, especially as it will tie into my dissertation more, which will explore the 'beauty and the beast' sort of monster. This has also lead me to the film Tale of Tales, which also embraces the beautiful and monstrous weirdness of fairytales and folklore, so I may watch that again soon for inspiration.
I also found a really captivating illustration by Sophie Lécuyer of a woman with a wolf skin over her head that I'd love to explore. I could always combine the church grim story with Red Riding Hood, a story I seem to keep returning to, and have red riding hood as the dead soul, or in a weird twist inspired by this illustration, the wolf.
Basically I have too many thoughts and I need to get them all together.
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