Project 4: Brainstorming

We spent some time in class brainstorming what we actually wanted to do for the project. We all liked the idea of LED's, but weren't sure we wanted to do a performance piece after the poor results of a performance piece that Andrea and I had done for the first project. We did talk about a live performance where we would arrange ourselves into different stills with LED's on our clothing lit up to display consecutive images to the audience. We then shifted our idea towards a prerecorded piece to get rid of some of the risk of a live performance.

One nice element of our group was that we were all friends with each other and so while we worked a lot, we would also talk about what we did in our lives and let that inspire our work. We decided we wanted to tell a story and we knew that we wanted to stick with the concept of light in the darkness. We started talking about stories that we knew and that our audience would know. We began by discussing fairytales then moved on to discussing movies. Andrea mentioned that the Wizard of Oz was her favorite movie and we felt it would work well because it is a timeless classic that sparked the change from black and white to color cinema and just about everyone in our culture is familiar with the story.

Although we all liked the Wizard of Oz idea, we felt that we needed to do something new with it, not just show it with lights in the dark. Andrea began talking about the movie Memento that she had been watching the night before. We all loved how the the story wasn't told in a linear order, but rather in reverse. We wanted to tell the story of Wizard of Oz like Memento was told, so we thought about how we could tell the story in reverse. One idea was to film it normally and simply play the entire video backwards but we wanted to stay more true to the Memento inspiration. We had the idea that Dorothy could dream and visit the world of Oz over different nights of sleep and we could split the story so that a small section is told is each night. We could then arrange the dream sequences that she has each night to be in reverse order like in Memento. In between the dream sequences we could return to Dorothy waking up from her dreams in Kansas.

The group as a whole appreciated that in the original Wizard of Oz the scenes in Kansas were filmed in sepia while the scenes in Oz were filmed in full color and we wanted to carry that effect into our film. When Dorothy is in Kansas we plan to film her with a video camera and use a sepia filter while in the world of Oz we plan to film using still digital photos in full color. We felt the still digital photos would work better in the world of Oz because we would have more control over the sensitive lighting.

One issue that we knew we had to address was the creation of the LED's for the movie sets, costumes, etc. We began to do research on the cost of LED's and assembly time and quickly learned that it would be far beyond what we could spend to create the entire movie in LED's. Additionally set/costume design alone would have taken more than the entire semester. We instead opted to look into using multiple different non-traditional light sources. Some ideas that we came up with were glow-in-the-dark paint, black light paint, and pre-assembled LED's like Christmas lights. This would drastically cut down on assembly/design time as well as keeping the project within our budget.

Another day we met up and put each key scene in the movie on a sticky note and stuck a large sheet of paper for each night onto a bench. As a group, we then stuck the sticky notes onto the sheet of paper for the night we felt it would fit best. After some time, we had decided which night each important scene in the movie should take place on.