I’m continuing to work on the film. It is a constant series of decisions of which location to start with, what to end with and how to order everything inbetween.
Twentysix photographs are the counterparts to the paintings on the porcelain in the Charles Norman Collection. These images have been edited to look like postcards. I decided on postcards because I felt that the 18th Century artists had produced not only decorative designs for tea sets but they had also written a road map of tourist attractions that are still relevent today. I also thought that the postcards would help the viewer to differentiate between the listed locations and the general images taken in the same area.
For the place names on the postcards I’ve used the same font as in the Charles Norman Collection book. Some of the names are spelt differently now, so Allestry near Derby is Allestree as we know it today. I have kept the old spellings to allude to the past even though the images are contemporary.
For my first draft of the film I assembled the photos in an order that was aesthetically pleasing but I found this wasn’t the right structure. Something was wrong with the flow. The film had a meandering about it that I didn’t like and it seemed to be because I’d varied the amount of images after each postcard.
The film is silent with a small amount of video. It needs a structure that is not too predictable. I felt that if I used a series of numbers to equate to the images I might find a sort of musicality or visual poetry that although elusive to the viewer might make it more visually pleasing. Maths is not my thing, but it works in an invisible way in nature and so why not in filmaking ? It’s worth a try.
So, by trial and error I’m working through different numeric sequences, which I shall then repeat as sets until I find the rythym I’m looking for.
