Wednesday 3 November 2010

Cigarettes, Hats, Sunglasses

Well, now it's most definitely official.Taking a quick break from working down the mines, I figured I'd jump back in to the world of bloggery. When I did this last time, I tried to kid myself - 'This isn't a blog, I'm not that person; this isn't 2003 anymore'. The ruse lasted minutes and I decided to end up here next time I tried it. So let's go.

We've actually made progress in the creation of our new piece, but not so much in a practical way. Quite quickly, we've realised that our knowledge of the silver screen is extremely limited compared to the enormous amount of films that are actually out there, so if we wanted to follow our mediatised dreams, we'd have to brush up. Between the huge amounts of New Vegas and Branston Pickle that took up my night yesterday, I picked up a copy of A bout de souffle and am planning to give it a good looking over, followed by many others - it's been done a-plenty, but there is something still very interesting about the 'Noir' feel.



We're playing around with the idea of people coping with their own situation by 'living through' other media. We had a great bit of discussion about American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Mainly along the whole 'Is this actually happening at all?' route. Don't get me wrong, the last thing I want to create is some story where the main character turns out to be rocking back and forth in an asylum the whole time, but it's an interesting bit of storytelling, but I'm still not sure if I'm sold on the Shyalaman-twist yet. I think it's about the coping mechanisms we use, some more than others, but I can't honestly say that I've never done the same myself.

I feel quite lucky at the moment to be rolling out the 'Artist in Residence' card at Lancaster University. It's starting to dawn on me how expensive the facilities here would be to anyone else, and how little revenue one can generate when you're just getting off the ground. We've got a long way to go before the multi-million pound merchandise deal kicks in and after the recent cuts funding is going to be more sporadic than ever. I'm hoping for as much help-in-kind as I can get my opportunistic hands on. It's shameless, but unfortunately, we still don't live in an age where rather than turning over your cash, you can just say 'I'm not paying, I'm an artist'.

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