Week 5 stills and narrative: brainstorming

I spent much of this week thinking about which still images to choose for this week’s assignment. Given that these images will shape our final project for the rest of the 10 class sessions, the pressure seemed on. “Reverse engineering” the images into a narrative seems pedagogically and experientially interesting—finding multiple stories emerging from a set of (stock-y?) images: the genie gets its power from its lamp (from limitation, like a sonnet).

But mostly I went the other way with story ideas running through my head. D for following directions.

Given that I feel strongly about developing a narrative sense, as opposed to bright little ideas flitting here and there, the assignment seems exciting, fraught, demanding. So I’ll transcribe all of the many ideas I’ve had for narratives this week, and give a few separate sets of images to exemplify.

At this point, I suspect that my ideas outpace my technical skills in terms of photography, photoshop, and even scanning. With a library and a scanner I could pull this assignment off with more aplomb; let’s think of this week’s output as a preliminary draft.

There’s a Stanley Fish book, Doing What Comes Naturally. That’ll be the day with media based storytelling as opposed to in-person storytelling.

Major lines of thought

“Architects in Love” or, better, “Architecture in Love”
“Duchamp: Secret Agent Man”
“The Story of Jessica and Chip: Demographically Ideal Partners”

Other story ideas

Classical or literary story.
—Use modern folks. Friends?
—Tell the story all with famous pieces of art (pietas, moses in the desert…Michelangelo’s Moses with horns, manuscript images, a whole stories from black or red figure classical vases [amphorae].)
—Modernist art images (maybe too easy or too oriented to narrative or anti-narrative already)

A story told by words on neighborhoodies coming in and out of the frame. Expensive. Could one cut a deal with the neighborhoodies folks? Music video-esque.

Use old ads to tell a story
—Danger of fallling into irony or stepping into Barbara Kreuger territory. Quickly moves into iconic territory for good and ill.

Biography
—Philosopher or mathematician (handwritten text or equations dancing across the screen); athlete, politician, warrior
—Think The Right Stuff

“How-to” or schematic story
—Storyboards
—Cross section or X-Rays
—Kids books such as David Macaulay’s Castle, Pyramid, etc.
—Illustrated science books for kids, DK books, etc.
—Figures moving through blueprints. Similar to those top-view video game maps or a Chris Ware comic.

Borgesian or infinite library story
—See illustrated Borges story at St. Mark’s Bookshop.

Hipster tales
—A day in the life of Dov Charney / American Apparel
—“Architects in love” hipster semiotics, social mores, and power plays

Documentary
—Could work well for the form. Easy to intersperse historical or heavily photoshopped (synthetic) images with talking heads speaking about the events depicted.
—Associations include of course Ken Burns but also various Woody Allen joints, e.g. Zelig especially and Sweet and Lowdown. Also a staple of the music documentary model such as Westway to the World about the Clash.
—Comedic possibilities abound, especially through amusing juxtapositions with the folks you could pretend to interview; think about the effectiveness of Rick James on Chappelle Show.
—Challenge: doing the voices for familiar interviewees or characters.
—Easier to do characters whose faces not voices the audience would recognize?

Genre ideas
—Sci-fi; fantasy; horror, political
—Art/Inday, portrait of a wacky loser; existential story or passion play; fractal narrative
—Theater or behind-the-scenes; two starts talking with many over-the-shoulder shots (Ellizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to be obvious and inherently amusing).
—70s movie feel—long shots, lots of silence, space, and dialogue: Klute, The Verdict, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor.
—Boy Meets Girl: star crossed Rome+Juliet style; love across the tracks a la John Hughes; black comedy a la Heathers or parts of Reality Bites; dumb/beautiful; screwball; Tracy/Hepburn; Bogart/Bergman or Bogart/Bacall.
—Bildungroman or Kunstlerroman

• Think of scene in RKO 281 with Live Schreiber playing Orson Welles as boy genius, soaking up the conventions of filmmaking by watching reel after rell of genre flicks.
• Classic New York School—John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Wallace Stevens (quelle drag). Who is an artist you’d want to watch grow up? Pretty good that asperger’s guy in Shine.

Completeness
—Kind of my theme when I embarked on graduage school—why are people drawn to narratives that seem to have explanatory power: religion, politics, philosophy, aesthetics. How to make a film, more clearly a series of stills, that taps into and/or illuminates this questions?