Leveraging my sculptural practice in the design of cinema. A process of creation that bounces back-and-forth between planning and exploration. Design-thinking/step-by-step.
Research which may include travel, interview, and literature/film. Define the parameters of each project. Studio driven ideation phase: building, drawing, painting, and photography which often leads to sculptural iteration.
Ponderously, a narrative develops from a kernel of an idea. Ideas accrete characters, scenes, and narrative. Prototypes are both informed by the story. The story is informed by the objects. Symbiotic.
Elements are reformed, combined, discarded until a cohesive narrative like a well-worn neural pathway remains.
Film Review:
Fritz Lang, Metropolis
Jean-Luc Goddard, Alphaville
Andrea Tarkovsky, Solaris
Narrative Space:
Tom Every, Forevertron
“Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it. What do we really know about the origin of the Universe? A blank so wide can be filled with myths and legends.”
Stanislaw Lem
2021: LIMINAL
In the Spring of 2020, I collaborated with a fellow student, Amanda Schroeder, to write an anthology series about a character who watches vignettes pulled from the memories of disembodied brains. We navigated a shooting schedule defined by a pandemic to produce a short pilot episode.
Mickey
A low-level worker who watches memories and investigates small mysteries.
Gala
An artificially intelligent digital co-worker.
Scout
Childhood memories set in a golden age.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. “
Vladimir Nabokov
2020: ARCOLOGY
With a research grant from UW-Stout, I was able to travel to Arizona’s high desert where I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliescent West, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, and several archeological sites. The experience shaped the narrative of a short speculative fiction narrative that I began making in 2019.
“The real (universe in its totality) is a
Paolo Soleriscientificsystem gazing upon itself by way of man’s intellect (reflection.)”
“There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.”
James Thurber
2019: SPiN
At first, I wanted to explore the use of miniatures and kinetic sets. But I learned a lot more about narrative structure. Two characters representing thematic poles: Nature versus machine. Childhood versus adulthood. Play versus work.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
Arthur C. Clarke
2018: SWEEP
The project was my first effort in small world-building. A low-level worker collects trash which he is obligated to feed to an incinerator (Molock). I wanted to show a glimpse of his world; a narrow perspective. If Fritz Langs’ Metropolis represents the god’s eye view of an Arcology; I wanted to show a worm’s eye view.
Like the silent films that inspired me, I wanted to build sets like theatre props and incorporate a strong, ever-present score. My sculptural work acted as a sort of diegetic artifact (MacGuffin) that informed the narrative.
“We were making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.”
H.G. Wells
“Cinema is the one art form where the author can see himself as the creator of an unconditional reality, quite literally of his own world.“
Andrey Tarkovsky
