Great progress on the Jabberwocky video today, though at times dogged by dead ends. All creative work has dead ends and lots of time wasted chasing unusable dreams. This phenomenon particularly seems to plague the film maker.
First, I watched the Japanese film Hausu ('House') last night - an amazing film which I'd not heard of until two weeks ago when Deb gifted me the DVD. Sadly, the creator, Nobuhiko Obayashi, died last year, which is probably why it's undergone a bit of a renaissance. Made in 1977, the film was released on DVD (and had a limited cinema release, apparently) in the US and Britain in 2010.
Technically a horror film, Hausu is really a surrealist Romantic film (Romantic like a 19th century symphony), making use of every emotion; even great tenderness for the ghost at the end. One of the most inventive, and best, films I've ever seen. If anything, it reminded by of The Holy Mountain, but far superior. As a horror, it's hardly scary and contains a lot of comedy. The sounds and special effects reminded me of Chinese classics Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Mr Vampire, and the old Monkey series, and the initial bright colours and constant pop-music-like background reminded me of The Monkees show or The Banana Bunch, but an endlessly captivating film. I must look up more work by Obayashi.
The imagery was exactly the stimulation I needed. Hausu is the sort of film I would make. So many films now are all pretty photography (all modern films are lit and framed beautifully) but have no story or emotion. Hausu is the opposite, a breath of fresh air.
I started the day by working on the animation sequence for the climax of the music. I wanted at least a jabberwocky image torn or destroyed, and a spiral of Alices, and I spent a lot if time creating a 3D model of a plane in lots of segments to use in my bespoke software Argus:
I had to work out how to texture the plane as one object, but save out little shards of it as individual objects. Fortunately my software Hector can hide or show specific polygons, storing the visible arrangement in something called a 'vision state' so I used that. After all of the time hiding and showing and saving these shards, it didn't look particularly good, so the first hours of the day were wasted. I scrapped it and simply created two polygons with a zig-zag edge. These still look very digital. I might go back and make them look more organic.
Then, Alice, which went more to plan. I had a few seconds to play with (the whole animation is 387 frames) so I added a spiral of love hearts and the white rabbit... chasing love. The Jabberwock of anti-love is slain and love is pursued... then lots of Queen's of Hearts' appear... (Liddell's mother?)
The result fades to the graveyard where I'm playing synthesizer. Getting this to work wasn't that easy because what appears to be a stationary shot has some hand-held quiver which I couldn't fake, so I had to use the actual video frames in my animation.
Then lots of timing changes and little flickers, memories, reminders. There is still a lot to do, but for the first time, I'm starting to like this video. There are flickers of emotion... love, the loss of love, death. These are always the ultimate themes in art.
These 6 minutes have taken me at least a week so far. I think Hausu took two years.
