Close up shot of the 1930s tea caddy which will feature in the film – Gift.
Pace has surfaced as a major theme in my professional life. I will be talking and blogging about it some more in time (appropriately enough), but it is also key to this marvellous experience of professional development thanks to a-n.
I wrote in my last post about how much I enjoy working with Simon Haynes. He is calm and measured and we take it ‘slow’. Only for ‘slow’ I’m beginning to realise that it would be more accurate to say deep.
And this is what is so brilliant about the self-led professional bursary. The artist gets to design the project and chose who to collaborate with – one aspect of my submission was about the importance of working within a previously established professional relationship.
Simon and I are comfortable working together for many reasons but I’m coming to see that the underlying sympathy between us is that of pace.
We’ve met a further two times since the last post. Once to download and begin to navigate Simon’s professional editing software (so much more sophisticated than my basic self-taught experience with iMovie), and a second time to plan our next shoot.
The brief taste of editing with this software has brought my ideas on about what could be possible, and it also informed our planning for the new round of filming.
I quickly realised that we’d do well to break down my poem into verses and mark out the visuals for each verse – and it is so much more more manageable in chunks. It also brought a surprise. A second narrative which I hadn’t quite identified before was lurking in the background waiting to be drawn out. I’m excited about this as it also brings in an element of ritual to the work which is important to my practice.
As it stands the poem narrates our principal story – but the visuals will now (we hope) both support it, and yet allow us to layer in a secondary thread.
Not ambitious for a 3 minute film! Haha!
Anyhow – suffice to say I am enjoying this project immensely, learning a huge amount about the work of creating a short film. This is down to the benefits of the a-n bursary design, which allows the artist to determine the pace and structure of the work. I’ll probably say thank you a-n each time I write.
Sorry if I sounds repetitive, but worth saying that for an autistic artist this is golden.
