Day 9! Filming, sampling, editing, museum, artist dinner.
Up at 4 this morning to have the streets for myself. I have some ideas for moving Draculus around in Rome, but need empty streets, and avoid the sun, of course, so he doesn’t burn up. The early hours are the only option, evenings are packed. Went out in a surprisingly quiet city, researching locations, camera setups, movements.
After an hour or so, the sun coming up was getting to strong for the light, the city was walking up and the camera went out of battery. So I continued recording sounds for a while, before traffic and Italians got too enthusiastic. I am still collecting sounds from the tiny drinking fountains on corners and in alleys, it’s a soft sound and often hard to isolate from the surrounding daily life.
Went home, studied the footage and took notes. Then the same process with the sounds. It’s slightly different tools for images and sounds but the process is mostly the same, review the recordings, label and categorize, make a note of what works and not. I’m currently still in the capture-and-observe mode, the editing and production I’m doing so far is mostly just trying out ideas, sketches, methods and getting a feel for the material I’m collecting. Some sounds and shots are recorded deliberately because I know I want it, others happen in the moment with a vague idea of direction. Slowly everything moves the project towards something.
I’m currently having ideas for three characters, a tiny story involving fatal love and a futuristic setting. All of them have sounds, music and some graphic or performative ideas. So far Draculus is the most fleshed out. He’s a 18th century vampire, been living in Rome since then. Unfortunately he’s allergic to blood. He’s secretly in love with the ghost of a Roman celebrity, still working on her details but I expect her to be some kind of gladiatrix. And at the moment all of this is happening in the future where a biological experiment went wrong and there’s a mutant monster on the loose to.
I think in the end it will be a 15-20 minute “thing” using sound, music, graphics, video and performance.
By 11 I had sort of done a full days work. Headed for the Maxxi museum for a change of mind and not at least temperature, it’s 30-something here, and my room gets baked in the mid-day sun. A cool museum with abstract ideas is a nice airy escape.
I enjoyed the museum. I often like to visit contemporary or figurative museums, they’re good places to escape, to work on ideas and concepts. I drift between paying attention to the artworks and conjuring up ideas on my own. I also like working in museum cafes, the Maxxi one did not disappoint. Airy, friendly, cool.
My favorite pieces at the museum was Gianni Colombo’s Spazio Elastico, a dark cube you could go inside, it was filled with thin strings in a 3D wireframe setup, being slightly stretched in slow-motion by simple mechanics, creating the illusion of being inside a slowly expanding wireframe universe. And Ettore Spallettis huge exhibion, wonderfully airy and calculated geometrics. Best of all was Yuri Ancanari’s “San Siro”, a beautiful, wordless video documentation of all the preparation work that goes into hosting an AC Milan game at their San Siro stadium. Marvellous imagery, fantastic sound design.
Took the bus back home. I’m not into busses, except for the few horrible moments I actually have to really go into them.
Now we’re going out for a fancy artist dinner, all of the artists at the house. Have to get ready and look presentable. Perhaps I should wear the vampire cape.
