How can I celebrate love,
now that I know what it does?
Gregory Orr
What is a symbol?
It is to say one thing and mean another.
Why not say it right out?
For the simple reason
that certain phenomena tend
to dissolve when we approach them
without ceremony.
Edgar Wind
THE DISTANCES
A Proposal byMichael Mills
01 October 2005
PREAMBLE
WRITING A proposal for a project about a monster that creates a monster is itself an exercise in monster-making. The horrific facts of the lives of Karl Tanzler and Elena Milagro Hoyos are uneasily fused to filaments of poetic intent. This fusion is then carefully packaged within a rigorous formal style and given a price tag. Since I’ll be welding together passages that don’t join together cleanly, I’ll begin with a little orientation:
Part I – Description of Work Created by End of Program
Content
Form
Part II – Content
Three Tales
Yet another Story
Karl and Elena
Apologia
Hidden Visions
The Distances
Part III – Form
Durational Structure
Visual Structure
Audio Structure
Production Format
Screening Formats and Venues
Cinematic Models
Part IV – Projected Work and Timeline
Part V – Miscellanies
Part I attempts a one-page synopsis of the video I intend to make by the end of the program of work. The synopsis should give an immediate picture of the substance and shape of the work in a general sense only.
Parts II and III relay the research and ideas compiled to this date. As this is a work-in-progress you will no doubt encounter core and tangential ideas at various stages of maturity.
Part IV outlines the projected work ahead and a timeline for each stage.
Part V compiles assorted loose-ends.
PART I – DESCRIPTION OF WORK CREATED BY END OF PROGRAM
Content
THE DISTANCES uses distances in space found in Canadian landscapes and architecture, joined with choreographed action and tableaux vivants, to illuminate distances in time. Movement and action within a carefully-controlled topography becomes an allegory for the fantasy of dominion over time, created and distorted by obsessive desire.
The Distances originates from the fusion of western fabled figures Charlemagne, Pygmalion, Polyphemus, and Orpheus with the contemporary real person Karl Tanzler. Each man (or in the case of Polyphemus, half-man) experienced an obsessive love that transcended the death (or non-living form) of the women they desired. They attempted to reverse death by attempting to reverse the effects of time.
There is a deliberate merging of past and present in this video. It’s an over-generalization, but for the sake of this introduction, imagine natural and man-made locations in the Canadian landscape serving as an oversized Greek amphitheatre.
The imagery is elliptical, abstract, and metaphorical. It is sometimes mythological, sometimes contemporary, and at all times cinematic. There is a sense of ceremony to the images, of inescapable progress, of stately slowness, of liturgical or ritualized grandeur.
Form
THE DISTANCES is a 79-minute high-definition video comprised of a rigorous formal structure of forty-five sections ranging in increasing duration from 41 seconds to 5 minutes 07 seconds. It could be described as forty-five audiovisual liturgies for the resurrection of the dead.
Each section uses a very slow zoom-in or -out and is comprised of one or several overlaid shots. The sections may use track (dolly) and pedestal elements in combination with the zoom.
The sections use real-time motion, slow-motion, or fast-motion. The sections are black & white, tinted, or full colour.
The sections are accompanied by silence, realistic sync sound, realistic sync sound offset by one section, electronic drones, sync dialogue, voice-over, or a prelude for organ by Bach.
PART II – CONTENT
Three Tales
I WILL start by relating two ancient legends with a contemporary true story. The first legend is about Charlemagne as recorded by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and retold by Italo Calvino:
Late in life the emperor Charlemagne fell in love with a German girl. The barons at his court were extremely worried that the sovereign, wholly taken up by his amorous passion and unmindful of his regal dignity, was neglecting the affairs of state. When the girl suddenly died, the courtiers were greatly relieved—but not for long, because Charlemagne’s love did not die with her. The emperor had the embalmed body carried to his bedchamber, where he refused to be parted from it. The Archbishop Turpin, alarmed by this macabre passion, suspected an enchantment and insisted on examining the corpse. Hidden under the girl’s dead tongue he found a ring with a precious stone set in it. As soon as the ring was in Turpin’s hands, Charlemagne fell passionately in love with the archbishop and hurriedly had the girl buried. In order to escape the embarrassing situation, Turpin flung the ring into Lake Constance. Charlemagne thereupon fell in love with the lake and would not leave its shores.1
The second legend is the myth of Pygmalion, as noted from Bulfinch’s Mythology:
(Pygmalion) was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it. It was indeed the perfect semblance of a maiden that seemed to be alive. Pygmalion admired his own work, and at last fell in love with his creation. Oftentimes he laid his hand upon it as if to assure himself whether it were living or not, and could not even then believe that it was only ivory. He caressed it, and gave it presents—bright shells and polished stones, little birds and flowers of various hues, beads and amber. He put raiment on its limbs, and jewels on its fingers, and a necklace about its neck. To the ears he hung earrings, and strings of pearls upon the breast. Her dress became her, and she looked not less charming than when unattired. He laid her on a couch spread with cloths of Tyrian dye, and called her his wife, and put her head upon a pillow of the softest feathers, as if she could enjoy their softness.
The festival of Venus was at hand. When Pygmalion had performed his part in the solemnities, he stood before the altar and timidly said, “Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife”—he dared not say “my ivory virgin,” but said instead—“one like my ivory virgin.” Venus, who was present at the festival, heard him and knew the thought he would have uttered.
When he returned home, he went to see his statue, and leaning over the couch, gave a kiss to the mouth. It seemed to be warm. He pressed its lips again, he laid his hand upon the limbs; the ivory felt soft to his touch and yielded to his fingers like the wax of Hymettus.2 Again and again with a lover’s ardor he touches the object of his hopes. It was indeed alive!3
The third story is a factual event recounted in Paul Christensen’s book Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael in reference to a line in one of Olson’s poems:
The allusion is to Karl Tanzler, an eighty-three-year-old x-ray technician, who fell in love with a sickly young Cuban girl. After her death he removed her body from the grave and preserved it in paraffin; he then kept it in his house for eight years, during which time he was forced to replace parts of her body with plaster casts. According to local newspaper reports, he serenaded her each night on a homemade pipe organ. When the police arrested him in 1952, they found the corpse dressed for bed and her hair decked in fresh flowers. He told the court at his hearing that he was building a plane and that as soon as she returned to life, he planned to fly with her back to Germany.4
The three tales share these traits: the theme of eternal love; elements of obsessive desire; the recreation of a woman “through trivial yet necessary signs, like the signs of a liturgy”5: clothes, jewelry, makeup, etc.; the possibility of madness; the presence of a dead (or non-living) female body.
The Tanzler story parallels the Charlemagne legend: both are about an old man’s unending love for a young girl who dies in their care. Both have the body of the young girl embalmed and maintained in their bedchambers after her death.
In Charlemagne, love is represented by a magic ring; depending on its bearer, love moves from necrophilia, homosexuality, to a contemplative inward-looking love symbolized by the reflective surface of the lake.
In a mirror-like reversal, the young German girl in the Charlemagne legend becomes the old German man, Tanzler himself.
The Tanzler tale is also an inversion of the Pygmalion myth. In the myth, Pygmalion’s ivory statue, which he named Galatea, is given life by the goddess Venus. In the Tanzler tale, the Cuban girl literally turns into a statue as her decaying flesh is replaced with plaster appendages, wax and piano wire: a Galatea in reverse. The white ivory (Galatea means “milky whiteness”) becomes the paraffin, a white waxy substance used for making candles, lubricants, sealing materials, and imitation marble. Bulfinch notes Galatea’s transformation from ivory to flesh that yielded “like the wax of Hymettus”. Beeswax, like that found on Mt Hymettus, is a soft, pliable wax good for modeling; paraffin, on the other hand, is a brittle substance that chips and breaks easily.
We fortify the connection between these tales when we note that Greek mythology gives us a second Galatea, this time a sea-nymph. She was the object of love for Polyphemus the Cyclops, a love she didn’t return. By all accounts Elena didn’t return Tanzler’s love either. He is both an auspicious Pygmalion and a heartbroken Polyphemus.
Ancient legends and myths are the stories associated with events, individuals, or institutions6; the Tanzler story is a true event that has the characteristics of a myth. The heart of this project is the contemporary Tanzler story.
Yet another Story
I’ve stuck to a specific line of comparison with the three tales above creating a kind of quasi-chimera out of Charlemagne, Pygmalion, Polyphemus and Karl Tanzler to show a strong storyline unbroken by distance, like an eternal river, but there are yet more stories that can be appended to this hybrid, like tributaries joining the main stream.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of those stories.
Orpheus played the lyre with such beauty that no force, be it human, natural or supernatural remained unmoved. He married Eurydice in a ceremony laden with dire prognostications. Shortly after their marriage, Eurydice was bitten by a snake and punctually expired. Overcome with grief, Orpheus journeyed to Hell to ask for Eurydice’s return. He sang such a mournful song with his lyre that the gods were moved to tears and agreed to return Eurydice to life on one condition: that on the journey out of Hell Orpheus not look back on Eurydice as she follows his footfalls. Just as they reach the exit back to the land of the living, Orpheus forgot his condition and stole a glance backwards. Eurydice was swiftly borne away. Bulfinch again:
“Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air! Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her? “Farewell,” she said, “a last farewell,” — and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears”.7
Here again we find the theme of returning the dead back to the living, this time with an appended contract with harsh terms: the joy experienced by a second life is exchanged for the tragedy of a second death.
We also find a parallel with Orpheus and Tanzler: both were musicians and attempted to harness the power of music to return the dead to the living.
The use of music in this piece has great importance to its construction. I go into more detail in the section dealing with the durational structure of the piece, but it will suffice for now to say that music in The Distances will have a liturgical function.
Karl and Elena
I’LL NOW provide a detailed account of the Tanzler tale:
In 1927, Karl Tanzler arrived in Key West after deserting his wife and two daughters in Dresden. He reinvented himself as the Count von Cosel.
Tanzler as von Cosel claimed to hold nine university degrees and soon found employment as an x-ray technician and bacteriologist at the United States Marine Hospital. He devoted his spare time to the construction on an airship, experimentations with electrical devices, and playing music on his home-made organ.
In April 1930, Tanzler met Elena Milagro Hoyos at the hospital where he worked. She was a young Cuban patient dying from tuberculosis.
Convinced he had dreamed about her for decades and that she was destined to be his betrothed, he wooed her with gifts and proposals of marriage. His love remained unrequited, yet he persisted in giving her care. He was granted permission by the hospital to attempt to cure her tuberculosis with experimental applications of electric shock therapy and potions laced with gold dust. Elena succumbed to her disease in October 1931 at the age of 22.
The grieving Tanzler paid for Elena’s funeral and she received a traditional burial. However, unable to bear the image of his Elena rotting underground, Tanzler designed and built an ornate mausoleum for her. Her body was disinterred, placed in a new metal coffin, and housed in the crypt. Every night Tanzler sat next to Elena’s coffin and began, he believed, to communicate with her. She begged him to release her from her prison so they could be together. Unable to resist her pleas, Tanzler stole Elena’s corpse from the crypt and began to bring about her resurrection.
For the next seven years, he held her body together with piano wire, implanted glass eyes in her empty sockets, made a wig of her own hair, strengthened her skin with paraffin and silk, and imbued her with perfumes to mask the stench of decomposition. He administered more shock treatment with a million-volt Tesla coil. He serenaded her with his home-made organ and slept beside her. By 1940, the rumours could no longer be overlooked. Eventually Elena’s sister confronted Tanzler and discovered the body.
Tanzler was arrested and imprisoned to await trial for ‘malicious and wanton disfigurement of a grave’. Two local friends posted bail and he was released. In court, the grand jury found no law under which Tanzler could be tried which was not limited by the statute of limitations (two years was the statutory limitation for molesting a grave, and Elena had been with Tanzler for seven years). Having been declared sane by a team of doctors he was released without charge; the same doctors performed the autopsy on Elena.
The details of the autopsy remained secret until 1972, when Dr. Julian DePoo, a Cuban expatriate and friend to Hemingway, made an admission: “I made the examination in the funeral home. The breasts really felt real. In the vaginal area, I found a tube wide enough to permit sexual intercourse. At the bottom of the tube was cotton, and in an examination of the cotton, I found there was sperm. Then I knew we were dealing with a sexual pervert.”
Elena’s body was re-buried in a unmarked grave. Facing financial difficulties, Tanzler left Key West to live with his sister in Zephyrhills, “The City of Pure Water”, where he spent his remaining days writing his memoirs, telling his story to tourists and showing them a wax replica of Elena he had made using her death-mask. In July 1952, twenty-one years after Elena’s death, Tanzler’s body was found flopped over the effigy of his eternally beloved.
The person or persons responsible for the secret burial of Elena’s corpse buried a weighted box instead and returned Elena to Tanzler, which means the effigy of Elena he proudly displayed to tourists was not a replica at all.
Apologia
FIRST OF all, it can’t be ignored that Tanzler was a sick man and any project that attempts to romanticize the details of his story is wrong-headed and irresponsible. Furthermore, on the surface, the story is grizzly and sensational; it has the quality of a ‘stranger than fiction’ story, or a ghost story, or tabloid fodder. Key West makes up one point of the Bermuda Triangle, so the even the setting has a patina of ‘the unexplained phenomenon’. I make pains to point out that to evoke these base qualities for easy entertainment is opposite the intent of this project.
Hidden Visions
IT IS important to emphasize that the specific facts of the Tanzler story are not in the focus of this project. Personally, I’m not interested whether Tanzler loved Elena or not. I am very interested in how idealized love, in the classical sense, can be borne out of such wretched behaviour.
The Tanzler story (and its mythological precursors) is only the wellspring of the piece. I wish to seep the essence of the themes from these tales to use as the source of imagery and sound for my video. The project is intent on using this source material as a jumping-off point for more poetic, elliptical and experimental ends. For the sake of this proposal I will often use the name “Tanzler” not to evoke the real person but to refer to the conceptual nexus of the project.
The intent is to merge the ancient myths with the contemporary tale and collapse the distance of time. This collision will illustrate how conventional ideas about time and space have no meaning to certain themes, such as stories about the idea of obsessive love. These stories we call “ageless” and “timeless” reverberate throughout history because they tickle the hidden depths we all carry. These depths may be non-intelligent, non-rational and non-moral.
The Distances
THE DISTANCES8 therefore is an attempt to strike a deep chord; it is an attempt to induce the vanishing beauty of pure time. It is also the chasm between who we are and who we wish to be.
The very word “distances” conjures up notions of vast space, stillness, heat waves distorting the horizon line, far-away places obscured by mist, half-remembered landscapes, etc. I contend it is always physical geography that first comes to mind. Much of the project will be concealed by this contention with the deliberate emphasis on space. I will do this by combining spatial indicators (landscapes, architecture, etc.) and spatial distorters (certain types of weather and natural light conditions, etc.) with the deliberate use of an insistent zoom movement, together with supplementary dolly and pedestal movements, to constantly transfigure the spatial topography.
Examples from Greek and German mythology are distilled for immutable structures to support new work. It is an interpretation of the chief irony of modernism: that innovation is the only legitimate means to a link with tradition.
A link to tradition is a link to the past. The manifestation of obsessive desire is an attempt to transcend the ruins of time. Obsessive desire, as an ideal, acts like a lure or siren’s song that blinds us from the piano-wire and plaster holding the whole fantasy together.
PART III – FORM
Durational Structure
LITURGY IS a body of rites for public (i.e., outward displays) of worship. Dressing up the dead with signs of life is a liturgical act. So is the performance of music written to celebrate the lifecycle of Christ. The liturgical year is the temporal structure within which the Church celebrates the holy mysteries of Christ: “From the Incarnation and the Nativity to the Ascension, to Pentecost and to the wait in joyful hope for the Lord’s coming” (Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy).
Karl Tanzler played his home-made pipe organ for his beloved Elena every night. It’s tempting to imagine he played liturgical music in hope for the return of Elena. It’s tempting to imagine he played the liturgical canon of J.S. Bach.
Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) is a collection of forty-five choral preludes for organ written for the Lutheran Service as musical commentary on the liturgical year.
Bach’s chorals give The Distances its durational structure. I’ve reorganized the chorals from shortest to longest. Most of the chorals will be left inaudible save for the most melancholic. The actual number of pieces used will be determined in the post-production stage. At this early point, I do plan to use longest (titled: O Man, bemoan thy grievous sins) which will occur at the very end of the piece.
The video will be composed in forty-five parts ranging in increasing duration from 41 seconds to 5 minutes 07 seconds.
The reordering produces a mixed-up liturgical year, in terms of musical content. For The Distances, this represents Tanzler’s attempts to manipulate the natural cycle of life and death.
Visual Structure
IT IS my aim to make a video with a progressively slowing tempo and longer shots with cycling, increasing levels of content. The slowing tempo represents aging and death. The longer shots and cycling, increasing content represent the insistent repeating that comes with unyielding obsession. Repetition and obsession are closely tied together.
In other words, the form described above has a function: it is to dramatize obsession. The form is an emblem for the theme’s obsessive recurrence or for a subject’s attempts to find its way through or beyond – Tanzler’s attempts to reverse death.
The form is rigorous and highly controlled; it might be compared to strict poetic form. The reason for this is simple: thematic disorder draws itself to a comparable amount of formal order. Highly emotional subject matter combines with a large degree of formal control.
Each section is to be a imagining of the vision of a Tanzler-like character. The visions get progressively intense and sustain themselves longer. One can imagine Tanzler cranking up his Tesla coil to send a million-volt jolt into the corpse of Elena, the image so akin to Dr Frankenstein attempts to give life to his monster8. With the ability to “over-process” images in the post-production phase, experiments in intensity will be carried out with the formal qualities of video. The use of layers, cross-dissolves, sudden cuts, arbitrary use of black and white, tints and full-spectrum colour, reverse-motion, slow-motion, and fast-motion all arouse an “ontological instability”, to use Phillip Lopate’s term.
Time can be represented in film and video in many ways. Here is a list, which is by no means definitive:
1. Action or movement within the film frame
2. The joining of actions separated in time by editing
3. The use of time-lapse or slow-motion filming techniques
4. The superimposition of one or more shots over another
5. Allusions made by on- and off-screen commentary
6. Allusions made by off-screen action and sound
7. Long-take shots that call attention to their duration
The intent is to use any and all of these techniques within the matched slow-zoom continuum. The zoom then acts like a bracket or container, like a “greater” time containing sub-times, like an aquarium displaying several types of time shifting, overlapping, and enveloping one another.
Each of the forty-five sections is comprised of one or multiple shots from up to two cameras linked together in a single zoom continuum: each camera will be set to tape the scene from a different angle and at opposite ends of the zoom spectrum. At the mid-way point in the continuous zoom, the two images will “cross territories”. The editing will be in part based on or around these moments. Multiple takes based on slightly different staging (for no action can ever be repeated precisely) will be cut together, creating slight shifts in the action. The zooms remain continuous, moving slowly along the zoom axis, while the content (characters, objects, etc.) shift around the screen. By using zooms moving in opposing directions on each camera, one can reverse a zoom in the editing, creating a parallel zoom, but with backwards action in one.
The single zoom continuum can be composed from shots taken at slightly different times of day, or with slightly different actions. There will be three constants: the framing, the zoom speed and zoom direction, so each shot can be overlapped by way of superimposition or cross dissolve and put into sync along the zoom axis. The intent is to create different periods of time along a single zoom continuum.
The zoom is very slow, ranging in speed from 2.5 minutes to 4.5 minutes from telephoto to wide-angle and vice-versa. For instance, from part 38 to part 45, (at a total time 26:09, these final 8 parts are 2 seconds more than one-third the piece) only the slowest zoom setting can be used, for the slower zoom settings are too brief for the part lengths. Conversely, the first 11 parts are 1:05 or less, which means they can utilize the 1:06 zoom setting (for a total of 9:07).
The compositions take on mythical weight due to the limits of framing with a zoom lens. The framing and subject must respect symmetry and perpendicularity to get the most out of an ever-changing composition.
To sum up, the form of The Distances resembles the merging past and present source material: the imagery and sound (certainly the music!) have a classical flavour, yet it is the structure of the video that conveys a contemporary tone.
Audio Structure
THE AUDIO in each section will be one or more of the following types: silence, voice-over narration, on-screen dialogue, sync sound effects, off-screen sound, sound effects offset by one section, or choral music by Bach. When and where each type will be used will be discovered in the writing and editing process. The function of audio is to help create a dynamic sense of space and to advance the suggestion of narrative. Words and sounds can help reign in images intent on carving elliptical pirouettes.
Production Format
THE DISTANCES will be shot simultaneously on two High-Definition Sony cameras with a horizontal resolution of 1080 lines (owned by the artist and the cinematographer). The video will then be assembled offline on the artist’s computer equipped for high-definition non-linear digital editing, then processed with the aid an edit-decision list (EDL) at a post-production studio.
The finished format will be a master on Digibeta and DVD, with the elements designed to be transferred to 35mm if desired. The cost of a 35mm transfer will not be included in this grant.
Screening Formats and Venues
THE POTENTIAL to present this type of work publicly will depend on the number of venues along the short theatrical – gallery axis. To that end, I would like to experiment with screening formats with this piece. The forty-five sequences are assembled sequentially for theatrical presentation (i.e., festival screenings), but they could be reassembled or shown separately. A smaller number of episodes could be shown in a gallery setting, for instance, or individual episodes could be shown on cable television to round out the hour between commercial-free feature programming (as is the case with Bravo Television). Then there’s this little thing called the internet…
The point is to look beyond the traditional of venues for a limited number of types of film and video categories. This resistance is aimed at the medium itself: classic film is essentially “pachydermous” and the venues for film still largely support the film model. Of course, digital is rapidly changing that essence, from copyright law, all-digital venues and festivals, simultaneous theatrical, broadcast and retail release, and cheaper means of production: to be small, mobile and independent, as digital encourages, is, in fact, anti-elephantine.
Cinematic Models
THE HISTORICAL body of cinema supplies some of the fuel for this piece. Thematically, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is at the heart of films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrei Tarkovsky’s (and Steven Soderbergh’s) Solaris and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu: a woman returning from the dead to live a second life twinned with a man falling in love with a ghost. The theme of a person returning from the dead is, almost without exception, the hidden premise in every film of Alain Resnais.
Formally, I’m taking some of my cues from North American avant-garde cinema, specifically structural film from the 60s and 70s.
The zoom structure described above is a descendant of the 45-minute zoom structure in Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Instead of being a single continuous zoom, The Distances is composed of multiple zooms to create a sense of a greater continuous zoom. In the second half of Snow’s film, he uses optical printing to expose the elements of film: film flares, multiple film stocks, black and white inversions, etc. to create what P. Adams Sitney calls “a calculus of mental and physical states”8. The Distances will use the broad digital palette available to push images in all sorts of directions to suggest a metaphysical instability.
The video also resembles the structural films of James Benning, especially his recent 13 Lakes, thirteen ten-minute shots of lakes across the US.
The audio component will occasionally use a sonic correlative of Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) where the narrator’s description of the image is always one scene ahead of the image being described. I am interested in acoustic evocations of a space just off-screen, which works well with a zoom-out for it breeds expectation of the source of sound will be revealed. By evoking the sound ahead of the image (even a whole sequence ahead) one can create the kind of temporal discomfiture that befits this project.
I brought to mind the idea of a Greek amphitheatre in the Canadian landscape in my introductory pages: the amphitheatre films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet like Antigone and Moses und Aron are of clear interest for a project like this.
I’m also interested in films photographed by cinematographers like Gianni Di Venanzo, Sacha Vierny, and Sergei Urusevski. Di Venanzo and Vierny created a kind of architectural cinematography in films like L’Eclisse and L’Année dernière à Marienbad; Urusevski managed to almost completely bury plot and theme in films like The Cranes are Flying and I am Cuba by the sheer force of his cinematography.
Part IV – PROJECTED WORK AND TIMELINE
Continuation of research around the story of Karl Tanzler, including obtaining court documents and a recording of Tanzler himself describing his version of the events. This material would be further mined for imagery. Continuation of research around mythological models and cinematic precursors of the story: the Norse Sagas contain a story about King Harald I have yet to investigate, for example, and the connection to James Whale’s Frankenstein seems obvious enough.
(01 March – 01 May 2006)
Assemblage of a shooting plan based on the forty-five section structure described in part III. This plan will not be a traditional script; rather, it will be part-map, part-grocery list. The technical demands of this project are quite rigorous; much care and attention must go into the planning of each sequence, including choreography of actors and camera movement based on the strict duration of each section. The ordering of themes will be worked out at this stage.
(01March – 01 May 2006)
Scout and videotape locations on Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia (for instance the old Kemano hydroelectric plant) and assemble a rough video “sketch” of the final piece. Fine-tune shooting plan based on requirements of chosen locations. Acquire permission to shoot in locations where required. (Note: some sections are projected to be relatively simple images of nature which could be acquired at this stage).
(01 May – 01 July 2006)
Assemble a team of collaborators including cinematographer Ruben Guzman, sculptor Terence Gower, actor Roderick Cameron, etc. Assemble small crew including builder/prop master Jerome Anthony.
(01 March – 01 July 2006)
Experimentations and construction of materials based on need. Acquire rental equipment such as lighting, tracks, etc. Acquire construction material as needed.
(01 May – 01 July 2006)
Videotape the forty-five sequences with the collaboration of cinematographer Ruben Guzman, sculptor Terence Gower, and actor Roderick Cameron, as well as other cast, crew and props.
(01 July – 01 September 2006)
Compile and edit the forty-five sequences offline; create soundtrack; record any overdubbing (if required). The use of language (be it recorded live or post-sync or narration) has yet to be determined. The editing stage will make those requirements clear.
(01 September – 01 December 2006)
Assemble edit-decision list (EDL) and other elements for post-production house to perform online edit. Master on Digibeta and create multiple DVD copies.
(01 December 2006 – 01 January 2007)
