Project Premise

This project is my chance to push the idea of 'suspense' into a less predictable territory. My intention is to start with a source story that creates suspense through a slow and precise buildup of human interaction - and subsequently build a visual language that creates suspense more subtly.

My starting point is Raymond Carver's short story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" - a beautiful example of his writing style. Carver's writing is straightforward, stark and destitute of sentimentality. Language is pared down to the absolute minimum - narrative flow and characterisation is controlled precisely. Carver cites Isaac Babel's dictum, "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put in just the right place,"

He also spoke about how he approaches words and how he used them in his poetry and short stories:
"For me, Hemingway's sentences are poetry. There's a rhythm, a cadence. I can reread his early stories and I find them as extraordinary as ever. They fire me up as much as ever. It's marvelous writing. He said prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over. That suits me. Flaubert said close to the same thing, that words are like stones with which one builds a wall. I believe that completely. I don't like careless writers whose words have no moorings, are too slippery."

TENSION

The suspense of Carver's short stories is derived from both his subject matter and writing style. This story, like many others, is centred around somewhat isolated people, often facing loss and terror in the mundane circumstances of their own lives.
Carver's prose is often muted, even anticlimactic, but the atmosphere is tense. In these ordinary, marginal and routine lives, the reader senses an underlying mystery. He subtly suggests a series of conflicts which create a subliminal tension in the reader, a tension tht culminates in the disturbing last lines of his stories. Some methods he uses to create tension in his narrative are:

- He creates an expectation and doesn't fulfil it
- He frustrates readers by having his stories end abruptly
- Subliminal conflicts/subtexts within main narrative

In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", the reader follows a very simple scenario - two couples sitting around talking anecdotally about love. Beneath this conversation - one senses a strange and never fully identified tension between these four characters, between couples. I have set the parameters of working with letterforms over black and white film. I have also isolated some visual metaphors that echo aspects of the story. These could operate as studies:

- character (type) seeming cohesive, natural, ordered - and gradually becoming isolated. Each character ends in total isolation in this story
- character operating on a surface level, while some undercurrent element subsumes the surface action.
- playing with filming letters/words; and then animating digitally on surface of film.

Developments...

Each project I propose within my thesis work becomes a site of enquiry - a place and story I use to test out different modes of adaptation and different strategies for creating visual narrative. As I work on adapting Carver's short story, I realise there are different approaches to this story and possibilities for adaptation I am interested in pursuing. While related in that they all grow from and were inspired by this original story; these lines of enquiry are worth defining and clearly articulating from the beginning. As I learnt from “The Black Dahlia” projects, I suspect overlapping different approaches within one project can dilute the clarity of individual ideas.

I began first by making myself familiar with the languages I was choosing to work with – the filmic imagery which would make up the background, and the typographic imagery that would make up the foreground. Eventually, I planned to work with both elements together to create the final adaptation – but before I could speak ‘fluently’ in these new languages I gave myself some time to learn their grammar and nuance.

Type Studies

I began to play with the formal elements of letterforms and consider how the surface of the letter itself can be interrupted/ruptured by another letterform. These were purely formal studies that I later played with animating.




























































CREATING AN ALPHABET


All my initial studies were about exploring possibilities for type as the character of this story. I knew I wanted to experiment with filming type in a room (something I had never done before). I first created three variations on an alphabet that I then printed onto acetate, lit, and filmed. For this stage in my investigations – I worked only with the words of the title of the story – in order to keep the scale of the narrative under control and allow me to test formal possibilities for type without yet worrying too much about content.

CONSIDERING TYPE AND IMAGE

I began to create some rough studies of potential ways my type could operate over the footage I was beginning to shoot on 16mm black and white film. While my intention was to shoot type printed on acetate or tracing paper and physically manipulate how it moved and was placed over the background - I wanted to establish some variables to work with.

FILMIC LANGUAGE

SETTING THE SCENE

I began to use the medium of film to create a visual/tonal/atmospheric backdrop – a stage setting upon which the action of the story could play out. I quickly realized the editing of these parts would hugely shape how I could develop the plot of this piece – just as much as the actual shots. Working only in a confined domestic setting (drawn from the story), I was forced to try and create dramatic setups out of the most mundane objects – the doorway, a towel, a coffee cup. I was attempting to tell as much of the story’s emotion as I could in just this image layer – primarily through type of shot, lighting, and editing. This helped me work out the broader framework of the story – basic elements like a progression from afternoon daylight to nighttime darkness. I decided the story needed some aural cues to indicate action, so slightly altered the original by including a doorbell sound effect to indicate people arriving. I worked heavily with repetition as a way of building suspense and drama – which mimics the verbal repetition of the dialogue (and title) of the original story.














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SHOOTING TYPE

My next step with the film was to experiment with shooting type