Idea Brainstorming:
I want to do something with fiction or fantasy because I think it would be really interesting to try to bring out mystical elements through low budget iPhone videos.
My working idea at the moment is a story where someone is hiking and they’re following trail marks but they see a weird trail mark off in a direction that obviously has not been blazed. They follow the weird trail mark and it keeps taking them further and further from the path. I want to have it be a sort of cosmic horror where the forest is this sort of entity that traps the character, perhaps because the character did something to the forest. I want to use some experimental color and editing techniques like Cecilia’s video from Tuesday’s class to convey the horror aspect.
Inspiration Clips:
Tuesday In-Class
In Princess Mononoke, one place-based storytelling aspect that stuck out to me was the interaction between the ironworking clan and the forest. They wanted to harvest the forest’s resources but the spirit of the forest and the gods that inhabited it wanted to prevent that from happening. Essentially, it was humans vs nature.
In Nausicaa, one place-based storytelling aspect that stuck out to me was the fact that the jungle was remnants left over from a society that let pollution overrun them. The toxic jungle was feedback from the earth telling the people from the past to rework their ways. The militant clans in the future trying to destroy the jungle were going to repeat history if not for Nausicaa. The jungle shows how the people of the past destroyed themselves and how the people in the film were going to end up doing the same once again.
In the solarpunk video, one thing that stuck out to me was that fact that the term “solarpunk” doesn’t necessarily refer to only solar technology but it also refers to maintaining reciprocity between humans and their natural environments. I was stuck on how I wanted to incorporate solarpunk into my project because I thought I was going to have to film some solar panels or something like that but the video sort of opened up a lot of ideas and paths I could take.
Thursday In-Class
- Situation
- Character is hiking in the forest
- Desire
- Character wants to leave and go home
- Conflict
- Character follows suspicious trail marking, gets lost
- Change
- Character submits to forest
- Result
- I don’t know how I want to end it – maybe ending where character escapes forest and seems unaffected?
