Multifocal Camera Fiction: My Progress, Pt 1

December 05, 2006

After the documentary made in Boston, I took the Multifocal Camera device in a slightly more creatively abusive direction and made a fictional narrative with the same device. In a nutshell, the film, tentatively titled "Inside the ___ Mind of a ___ Man," tells the story of a man's walk home at night. I called the man Marley, but there's really no way of referencing that during the film. During his walk, he becomes disturbed by something he sees. He hears screams, gunshots, that may or may not be there.

The work is present in both third-person and first-person POV's. While the third-person actions are projected in cinematic 2.35:1 format on one side of the projection screen, the first-person POV is projected onto the flipside of the screen, interchanging between a calm reality and a schizophrenic and horrific illusion (or maybe not illusional?). I storyboarded all three narratives so that they would synch up in real time, and made a MAX/JITTER patch to allow webcam enabled motion detecting. When viewed from some distance away, the first-person shows the schizophrenic reality, but with a closer look, that reality fades away and becomes unapparent. My purpose is to make the credibility of either reality as ambiguous as possible, and to let the separation between the third-person action and the mind's eye force the audience to interpret the stories, which is rather challenging to understand on their own.

Here's a screengrab of my MAX patch in the works...before it finally worked:

Here are some of my storyboards:

Here are two screencaps of the third person portion of the narrative (click to see them in their NTSC dimensional wonder):

Posted by scribblepop at 12:13 PM| Comments (0)