In previous posts I've said how I get a lot of inspiration for my ideas from books, art and real life and newspaper stories.
I enjoy pondering on ideas, particularly when I'm on the bus. It takes our bus about forty minutes to get to town, so once I've scanned the Metro newspaper I start looking out of the window and let my mind wander. (I like to do this on trains as well, and also when I'm travelling on the 2030 last National Express coach out of London and it's dark, with just the orange streetlights flashing by, as we whizz up the M1!)
I've been thinking about the proposal idea for a while now and there's a couple of ideas that I have that keep coming back to me time and again.
The brief is that the film sequence would last about five minutes, and either be self contained or part of a larger piece. The film can be any genre including experimental and installation.
The proposal must contain a special effect (set up filmed in front of the camera) and a visual effect (effect created in post production).
The ideas that I keep coming back to involve 'fairies at the bottom of the garden', falling through glass or ice, and an underwater shot.
I think I know where the ideas have come from: I have been reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and so that would very much account for the 'fairies' idea, and whenever I watch a drama or film on TV that involves people being underwater (usually trapped underwater) I feel really claustrophobic and panic for the actor. I always wonder how they seem to manage to hold their breath for so long. I try and work out how it would be possible to film it. In one sense, it breaks the magic of the film because I suddenly become aware that this is an actor acting and there must be a crew very close at hand.
Trapped underwater scene from Lake Placid
The falling through glass or ice idea was spurned on by two scenes that I have watched recently. One is from a film clip that I used in the promo film that I made for SHU which is a montage of clips from films that graduates of SHU have been involved with. In the clip a climber's rope is cut and they fall through the ice. It is a great scene as you see them falling onto the ice and breaking it and then you see the ice from beneath and the body coming through the ice into the water:
The other scene that I saw that made me want to include the breaking glass / ice idea is a scene from the final episode of series four of Lewis. In this scene a man falls back over a balcony and falls through a glass roof with fragments flying everywhere. The scene is shot from underneath so when he crashes through the glass the shards come raining down on the camera.
I'm not quite sure how this is all going to fit together for the proposal but I'm enjoying playing out different scenarios in my mind. I think that the special effects are going to be me making some lifelike, working fairies with flapping wings that appear to really fly. I've got an idea about how I might be able to do this with some dolls, sheer fabric, copper wire and wind up bath toys! And I think the visual effects will be the smashing glass. Not sure yet. It might all change. But I do want to have a go at making a fully working fairy.
When I was thinking about making real life fairies I thought about the 'Fairies at the bottom of the garden' photos, and how it was believed for years that these fairies were real. (Perhaps they were?!)
The 'Cottingley Fairies' was a series of five photographs photographed by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917. The pictures were authenticated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1920 and the fascination with the real 'fairies at the bottom of the garden' continued until Elsie Wright confessed in 1983 that the two girls had faked four of the photos. But she insisted that the fifth one was real.
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