Major Project - Taste.

Despite being away from the blogging side of things for a while I've been working away at this project quite steadily. Having measured up to problems regarding content and direction in the preceding months. I've come to realise this project in a way that satisfies my interests beyond the course, as well as showcasing the various skills I've garnered here.

As such, I've decided to go about this project non-uniformly. Employing a different (to me at least) way of assembling a script, following through to the design process of the character models, which are still very much in play even in Maya, as I've elected to follow a low-poly methodology when approaching the aesthetics that this project will have.

As such, I began this project by trying to find the format first and foremost. Beyond what I knew I wanted to reflect from My Dinner With Andre and later when I discovered Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) by Jim Jarmusch. Using the former as a way in, and the latter as a way of informing myself of what I really enjoyed about this methodology. Coffee and Cigarettes was perhaps even more influential to me, as it's style is that of the meandering conversation where two people are placed in a hyperreal setting and discuss around a topic in a dreamlike way. Less of the more brusque and direct style of podcasts that I feel lend an air of inauthenticity wherein speakers are generally prodded into saying things as a through line to generate content, which is ironic when the situations within Coffee and Cigarettes are so obviously staged themselves. Why then, do they read so authentically?

        

It's somewhere in those thoughts that I settled on where I felt this project should sit. On the edges of what I feel the players are actually speaking about, set within a space that is so obviously crafted, yet it will be the conversation acting as a throughline that will serve to settle the viewer into believing in what they are seeing, despite the look and feel of the low-poly designs.

Below is a cleaned up mixdown of a 2 hour conversation between myself and Robert Lindsay, where I have sought to create a conversation, piecemeal, out of varying slices of the conversation. I found that by doing things this way, it's possible to create entirely new interactions within the recordings whilst not betraying the naturalistic qualities you get from simply sitting down and talking with someone. As such, there's a distinctly low-fi feel about things which, when paired with the visuals, I feel are entirely appropriate for this piece. There's a rough objective for the recording, which ultimately boils down to being about art, elitism, taste, culture & segregation/exclusionary behaviour, but this is filtered through in a very natural and flowing way, despite the patchwork means of its creation.


The pace of this audioscript will further change in the pre-viz process when timings are altered to lend a bit more dramatic pause to the audio and the delivery of the lines, so as to belay the sometimes rushed delivery in some parts, but I am largely happy with the way that this has gone, feeling that it doesn't betray my initial criteria for this project.