Calling your shots

Every time I watch a very deliberately composed film or comic book my mind reels at the thought process of the artist. It's one of the most important elements of storytelling - literally framing the story for the audience.

One can approach this concept of framing the story in a functional sense, simply choosing what angles and shots will tell the story as clearly as possible and capture the mood and emotions of the scene. This contributes to a visual story that is effective and engaging. Thoughtless, lazy compositions alienate the viewer and make a film intrinsically boring. I have a passion for trashy horror but even I can't sit through a series of sloppy visuals, even if the thrills are in place. On the other hand, the slowest moving film is riveting to me if the images are well thought out and meaningful as in a Terrence Malick or Andrei Tarkovsky film.

It's interesting that the two film makers that came to mind for me are known for the spiritual nature of their work. This definitely gives weight to the idea of "framing" the story through their compositions. It seems like the desire to convey meaning through your medium leads to more delicately considered images tracing back to early concepts of iconography and very old symbolism. Maybe it's a personal thing for me that I become emotionally moved when things are heavily symbolic. Something about the obscured meaning making it more powerful to the subconscious. Nothing is more annoying than this kind of story being too on the nose.

It takes a master to elegantly make use of visual symbols without being too obscure or too obvious. However the intent of the artist is also at play and it may be one's desire to play with symbols on a more surface level, which can be just s powerful, as in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. More often for me, I'm moved and intrigued by the less obvious, almost impossible to decipher visuals, like in Bergman's opening montage to the glorious Persona.

These ideas all makes me think about how we frame our own stories all the time. We compose the shots of our personal story and can frame it however we please, and this what I need to think about when crafting a visual story. What is the author's perspective and how obvious should it be? I'm partial to creators who work is idosyncratic and clearly their own. Creators like David Lynch who have their own vocabulary of symbols from which they draw, their very personal way of framing the shot. I'd like to explore Inland Empire shot for shot to see what secrets I can unlock.

West

Incorporating this heavily into my process

GRACE

Grace Jones "State of Grace" (1985) from Jordy on Vimeo.

Getting inspired - I'll have this on loop all day.

Habits

The past 2 weeks have been spent readjusting to the office life. It's something I really never wanted to do again, but desperate times call for boring jobs. It's not a terrible job by a long shot and my brain could always use some exercise, but it runs the risk of my creative brain getting lazy. I know this is something every creative person deals with, so this won't be the most thought provoking piece I've written, but sometimes I need a to bore myself to tears. So here's to habit forming, making things like it's an addiction. Using my time to try new ways to be creative. There was a time when I longed to learn carpentry and it seemed so unattainable - I'd really love to shed that part of myself. The part of me that says it's unrealistic to accomplish these things. It's also so easy for me to ignore the fact that I have accomplished things, especially in the past year when I was trying to go full on freelance. I worked on two feature films, the second of which will feature my art prominently as set decoration. I designed vintage props for a tv show. An experience that ultimately left me cold - my props look great but I was ultimately only credited as prop master assistant, a role that was not to my liking. Oh well. I can still be proud of my work as it is. This year I finally started to get a story started that I'd like to work on continuously - solving my structure problem by expanding the narrative outside of one format. I grew technically as an artist more than I have since art school. I got hungrier to learn more. The greatest sacrifice that I'm feeling of the 9-5 job is the inability to travel. Travel ranks high on my personal list of important things, with my ideal situation allowing for the freedom to move about when I need to. Also as much as I try to stick to regular hours and practice, I'm a night owl at heart - these mornings may be the death of me. This was a bit incoherent, so excuse the thought dump.

Hugely influential

Dirty Beaches are making a big impact on my style and thinking lately. The drifter vibe hits just the right spots for me and makes me think about how I'm living my life,like good art does.

the story goes...

Feeling stuck in a rut with my current abilities I started watching tutorials and decided to really up my game. Since I'm starting a day job I feel a little less pressure to create commercially viable work immediately, which means I can practice and apply to personal work.

But how can I incorporate all of the things I want to learn into personal work? What's the place of motion graphics and graphic design?

Here's what I have now - a body of illustration work with little context and fan art type stuff that was done so I could hashtag it and get attention online. A just started comic that I want to pour all of my ideas into, making it feel loose and unstructured. But maybe my illustrations can be snapshots of the world that I'm building with the comic. Maybe I can create a world where people are reading that comic and I can use motion graphics to animate this world and even create entertainment and corporations that exist in this world.

To use some previously mentioned themes - I want this narrative to take place in the future, but resonate a sense of nostalgia. Image are like old photographs from the future. The lives of people shown in different ways. Snapshots, videos, the comics they read, the music they listen to. It's all set to a blurry soundtrack, wistful and echoing.

It makes you want to pull up your roots and drift around - this place is populated with lost souls. It's Last Exit to Brooklyn, 20 years from now in a multimedia landscape. (Note to self: reread some Hubert Selby Jr)

As long as it's part of this world my projects will fell inspired, cohesive and, more importantly to me, create a larger narrative about the lives of people.

Inspiration

Adore this artist.