As always, pesky reality has interfered with my glorious artistic vision. After everyones pitches were made I paired up with Jaime as we seemed to share similar visions and ideas, as well as having compatible interests for this project. While my focus is on audio, hers is on visual, particularly night time shooting, which I am interested to learn more about.

Our first sit down brainstorm and we started with Jaime’s concept. We were bouncing ideas off each other so smoothly it was almost scary, we were in sync as we created ways to elaborate on or improve the ideas she already had. We had a few eureka moments when we thought of something that could really up the ante on this piece, or let us do things in an easier or more interesting way.

And then we moved on to my idea. As soon as I started explaining my idea to someone else she was quick to notice constraints to my vision that I had been blind to, so caught up in how cool something would look that I didn’t even stop to think about how I could possibly make it look that way.

We left the meeting with a strong idea of what to do for our first project, and with me back to square one for mine. My pondering led me to the conclusion that the visual component was holding me back, since all our troubles lay in how we were gunna shoot everything, as well as what location we could use. I approached Paul about doing an audio project. And his suggestion to me sparked an idea that I am fifty times more excited about than my original pitch. He told me that I could create an audio track, and then maybe Jaime could create some images to accompany or react to it.

Like I do with most suggestions, I took that idea and ran in an only slightly related direction. Something about the phrasing or the words sparked an image in my head that I held onto as a new way of doing my project that allows me to allow even more action and storyline, without any of the previous constraints. I’m going to shoot this as a comic book.

Kinda.

I’ll explain.

So you know how in comic books you’ll get whole chunks of dialogue in a panel, and yet you only have the one image to accompany it. The way we read them just fills in all the other actions that occur before and after that image, while the rest of the dialogue is occurring. But only the most important moment is shown, the moment that best encompasses what is happening in that moment, while that dialogue is being said. So I’m going to shoot short moments, the most important moments, that will be shown accompanying the audio soundtrack. It will be similar to this video, which is an audio reading of a Spider-man comic book

WARNING: Spoilers, and heartbreak ahead, this is a very sad issue of Spiderman.

A big part of this semester for me has been learning to work with whats realistic and use mistakes and constraints as opportunities, and I feel like its all been leading to this. I’m really excited by this new concept, which will do away with the constraints of the old one, allow me to flesh out the story a little more, and give it a fresher feel than just a plain video-with-audio. I’m already thinking up shots that will be inspired by comic book panels and elements, and I can’t wait to get to work.