time's a tickin'

So our scripts are due on Monday. Mine's about half-way done, so about 90 seconds left to go. I never dreamed one would need to muster so much energy to get three minutes' worth of film onto paper! Deceptively difficult, that one.

Still, I'm having a hell of a lot of fun crafting Fiend, particularly the voice-overs of Art himself. The character is really beginning to grow on me. I wonder if this is a natural part of the scriptwriting process? Do writers form curious bonds with the little imaginary fragments they breathe into life, or am I just uncessarily sentimental about these things??

In my mind I have a vision of a very experimental, sound-driven narrative. I want the audience to get inside this guy's head, to feel and experience the smacked-out delirium that had overtaken his world. The disorientation associated with a come-down is like a metaphor to mirror his fall from grace... from humanity, from himself. Though being the overwhelming optimist I am, I can't let it simply be a reflection based on that fact. There needs to be change, there needs to be movement. Characters must be fluid, as all humans are.

I'll bring him round full circle, but I won't lead him the entire way. Change is in the hands of the individual. Still tossing up a few motif ideas in my head, but I daresay there'll be a jehova's witnesses encounter somewhere along the lines - just ot keep life interesting of course :P

Watch this space.

conceding defeat

Well, I've given up and given in to some extent on trying to get WordPress to be my friend. I figure that if I do get it up and running I can just set it up to feed straight from here anyway, so that's that.

This morning's lecture gave me a lot to think about regarding how I want my script to be shot. I hadn't really given it a great deal of thought prior, but the aspect ratio used to film with can make an enormous difference to the narrative structure. A film like Apocalypse Now, for example, would not have had such an oblique, end-of-days feel to it had it been done on 3:4 or even 16:9. Its very structure and cinematic dexterity is heavily reliant upon the inclusion of the wide-wide screen, and Coppola's meticulous attention to detail is enough to awe the pants off generations of audiences, 28 years on from its release.

It's funny to think that movies were awesome well before I was born.

(No, I'm not an ageist, damnit!)

I'm thinking 3:4 might be the go with mine, but we'll see. I've flirted with the idea of 16:9 but honestly, I think it's probably best to stick to convention - at least for the purposes of this task and the genre it pertains to. I have thought about filming in black and white though, not just for the memory sequence, but the entire piece. Hmmm. We'll see what transpires when I finish the script.

Speaking of which... I'd better get on it - while I've still got energy (and motivation).

research: ABC/Four Corners' 'The Ice Age'

[This is what I just watched]
'A shocking close-up study of the new drug of choice: ice'

I guess it had to be done in order for me to understand what I'm getting myself into.. as far as my leading man is concerned. but fuck. Some of that doco is just purely and utterly disturbing. And there really is no other way of putting it.

I guess it's difficult to remain truly objective in the face of an illicit addiction. It is also very hard to rationalise that kind of thing, and the sorts of people they use on their programs really typecase addicts in a way that I don't agree with. Why do they scour the streets until they find the most derelict individuals with children they cannot name and cardboard boxes for homes? That is so disturbingly inaccurate of Australian drug culture it isn't funny.

Most of these addicts have jobs, lives, and friends that they try to hold down, while most of their suffering happens in private. That is the side I want to expose - the boy(or girl)-next-door aspect that gets overlooked in favour of what society deems palatable. If 'people' really knew what went on behind their neighbours' closed doors, they mightn't be such a judgemental mob. Because I know for a fact that drugs are *that* imminent.

It isn't always the junkie sleeping in the cardboard box whose life has been reduced to next-to-nothing.

Damn representation shits me sometimes. I'm going to have so much fun next semester ripping these freaking docos apart. Still, at least now I have some proper food for thought.