This is a guest post by Cait Davis.
In 2009 I wrote a series of short stories that were supposed to be a Halloween costume. My plan was to go as “The Unconscious” and hand out the stories as first person narratives for the receivers of said stories. But I didn’t make the costume and I was left with the stories. I loved them. They came from a different part of myself than what I am aware of in my everyday thinking, and I am fascinated with this part of myself, fascinated with this as a part of human nature. What is the river that runs beneath our every day meanderings? Who are we really? And what does that even mean–to be someone for real? These little glimpses of those sailing depths were what I held on to, and I wasn’t really sure what to do with the stories.
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| Photo of my old project binder |
I took the nine short stories I had written, and I put them into script format. I printed the scripts out, and I looked at them and I put them in a binder, and then I made other movies. I told my friends that those scripts were for later in my career, when I could make them the right way. In part I meant when I could afford to make them, but I also meant when I felt ready to make them. That’s always a funny idea, when a person feels ready for something. It’s pretty abstract, but you know it when it’s there.
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| Stories of the Unconscious logo–an original lino print |
About six months ago I launched a campaign using the film-centric crowd-funding website Seed&Spark. In collaboration with my friend and producer Sara Murphy, Stories of the Unconscious was launched onto the internet, and funding was successful. The campaign process sounds so simple when it’s written in two quick sentences, but it was an arduous task and a tale in and of itself that I’ll leave for some other time.
Now is where we can come back and revisit the idea of being “ready,” because “feeling ready” meant only that I was ready to not feel quite ready, if that makes any sense. I was ready to feel nervous and push forward; I was ready to not know what was going to happen; I was ready to have anxiety and frustration; and I was ready to get excited and have confidence and experiment with new creative processes. And it even meant that I was ready to make this project even if I wasn’t sure I was ready, if all of this needs further unclarification…
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| One of the many ways we sold our souls for crowd-funding dollars |
Sara and I had the money and now we were ready to make a movie. We organized the scripts from “easiest” to “most difficult” to ease our way into the production. We went on to film five of the stories over the next five months. There were confusions and stresses and things that needed figuring out and happy accidents and frustration and excitement and elation.
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| A still from “The Statue,” one of the nine stories that make up Stories of the Unconscious. Cinematography by Alex Hill. |
We’re now on the sixth film, and it’s going to take the longest amount of time to complete. This film is the only one in the series that is entirely stop-motion animation. I’m collaborating directly with my theater designer friend Damon Pelletier, and neither of us has any real experience with stop-motion animation.
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| The studio work table |
Together, we collected reference images and discussed the look of the project. The central character of our story is made from wire and computer parts. Damon scoured the streets for tiny pieces of rusted metal, circuitry boards, discarded hard drives, and various interesting trinkets. We bought armature wire and watched online tutorial videos. Damon went through at least three versions of the character before he was satisfied with one.
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| A shot of the central character on the set of our stop motion animation |
For the set construction, we decided on cardboard, a readily available material and one that doesn’t have to cost anything. Once again, Damon took to the streets, focusing on industrial buildings that discard more durable cardboard pieces. He also is not shy about diving into dumpsters and trash bins in search of the right material. Once acquired, he sorts the cardboard into different qualities and thicknesses. My favorite is when we walk down the street and he picks up a piece of cardboard and, holding it to his ear, he knocks on it and then says, “Oh, that’s a good piece of cardboard.” He’s turned into the cardboard expert.
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| Damon making columns for the set of “In the Well” |
Most recently, Damon and I have been working on a suburban sidewalk set that utilizes forced perspective. What this means is that each house in the set is actually smaller than the house before, creating the illusion of greater depth than what is actually there. This makes a space or a scene look larger than it really is.
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| Unveiling the trickery of forced perspective: the beginning of some urban house facades |
For the rooftops of the houses Damon is peeling off the top thin layer of a standard piece of cardboard, exposing the ribbed interior and therefore creating a roof shingles-like texture. We haven’t figured out the backdrop yet, but it may be a painted sky or some sort of rear projection. At this time, we are required to vacate from our current studio and so have to move our set up into the basement of Big Irv’s. After we complete this short, we’ll have three more before the whole series is filmed.
I guess, at the end of all of this, the big lesson I’m learning is that you won’t ever really be ready, so you just have to go ahead and start doing it when you feel like it. It’s like Robert Rodriguez says, “So you want to be a filmmaker? Wrong. You are a filmmaker.” Or, as David Lynch says, “The beautiful thing is the doing and if you love your work, that’s the greatest blessing.”
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| Cait on the set of “Smells Like Chewing Rubber” |
To follow the progress of ‘Stories of the Unconscious,’ click LIKE! on the official Facebook page.
Cait Davis is a media creator of short films, installations and video experiments. She is co-creator of an experimental slide show shown at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. A feature script written by Cait and her father, Derek Davis, was accepted into IFP 2010 Emerging Narrative program.