Building a Story and Character.

I've been busy editing a documentary and messing around...and came across the above footage. This idea was written as a script and the actors memorized their parts, but I changed my vision later and re-worked things and never editied the film. Yesterday, I thought since I had never edited it before, I would do a quick knock up of ideas and editing from the found footage. This is what I chose...

I wrote this and filmed it a few years ago. I am very lucky one of my best friends is an actor and she lets me put her into all kinds of predicaments and stories. She and I have done comedy improv back in the 90's and she's been in several film productions of mine. She is a very good sport.

...this vignette became like a workshop and it isn't complete...but it was a stepping stone for me to create a character based on this woman that my friend Anita plays. (you can see Anita out of character in these videos just relaxing)

I've written a long script, feature length actually, that came out of this "sketch video" above. It bears almost no resemblance to this "sketch" and the larger character is much more developed and not very much like the glimpse we see here...but still. I have a soft spot for this bot of film because it became a sketch for making a much more complex set of characters and plot.

I suppose I probably shouldn't even share this video except I think it is sort of interesting. And funny. As visitors here know I love goddesses and mythology. I love anthropology...and Shakespeare and in several little ways I can see these things unconsciously and consciously worked out in this video. There is the pre-amble...the exercise of the female character speaking out loud...to who? Herself? Formulating what she knows by speaking aloud. She encounters evil...and I was exercising the idea of Perspehone...in fact the character in the later story built out of this has the last name "Percy". I have written into my long script a "green world" but here the green world is represented in the autumn outdoors...the rebirth is occurring when the plants are shedding.

Anyways I decided to post this video because it represents something about the writing process and inspires me to remember how much I love the collaborative work of film...and how ideas are exercised and worked out and explored in art work.