Making sense of the Moon

If we could do this in my kitchen, my nice warm kitchen, I'd be much happier. Braving this cold weather is not good for me in the slightest. Trudging through the cold to get to the studio is putting me in a right grump.But that's enough meaningless complaining for this weeks post. And on that topic, I do apologise (to myself and anyone who reads this) for not making an entry last week - a time tabling change by Drew Hemnet threw me a bit off course.

So, what have we been up to in the past fortnight, I hear you ask with humouring apathy?


We carried on with our creation of filmic moments, playing them off each other; mixing them up and slotting them between each other as we saw fit, and playing with the OHP creating some really nice little visuals and stories. The idea was that the visuals became more and more realistic as the stories we told did the same. The first story was a fantastical love story inspired by 'Le Voyage dans la Lune', an old French film (well known by most for the scene where Mr. Moon gets shot in the eye), was told with very crude shapes and a fairly 'unreal' method of portraying it. But it did create a rather innocent view of love - a naive sort of depiction that you get on the silver screen. We moved through to more realistic stories which we have found through film, such as a tale inspired by everyone's favourite Krakozhian, Tom Hanks in 'The Terminal', which was 'based' on true events. (Though we are aware of how even 'true' events in Hollywood movies range between 'liberal' at best to 'lies' for most of the time). At this point we got a bit surgical with the OHP shadows, cutting out some nice detail with a scalpel to create some nice, life-like shapes. It's a simple idea, but it created some nice moments which had an innocence about them, and kept making us realise how much our views of love in our lives is preconcieved based on what we've been shown on a screen. Love is far duller than what we're shown - I'll never scoop a bullet out of my true love's chest and then massage her heart back in to cardiac rhythm with my bear hands (Christ, I hope not...) - and that's the way I like it, to be honest...

By stumbling about like this we made some beautiful moments, but that's all we had - moments (a concept which our last work was based on.) but no structure. The first time we put all this together and ran it all back to back we could see that we needed a frame to hold it all together. It barely made sense to us, so to make it a bit more cohesive we really did need to add some framing - not only that, but something physical. We were left with interesting texts which seemed to repeat on and on. The words did differ, but the performance remained the same and the pace just hasn't been thought of at all. The plan is to kill two birds with one stone, so to say.

We've been looking at love and the stories which it inspires so we thought we'd make up our own. For a while, we're going to tell our own filmic stories (which may or may not be about love). We'll write them out and then physicalise them - blend them with our own language which we've made up, and create a frame  which our moments can survive in. Whether or not the ones we have already survive, is pretty hard to judge - I hope they do - but if not, we've made our language which we can create work with. Now it's just time to write a story with it.