Digital Test Photo

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We haven’t gotten the film processed yet from our last shoot, let alone scanned, but here’s a quick digital test photo I shot while the actors were engrossed in fiddling with their new instruments. There’s no acting and no lighting here, but hopefully this gives you a glimpse of what we spent most of last weekend making and the amazing work our set dressing and costume apprentices are doing.

Lighting our Second Shoot - Part 2

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We had to move the time lapse camera after we setup the china ball style softbox lantern, so here's part two. One of the things you'll notice in this clip is that we gradually break down and replace each of the three modifiers we're using on the lights. I realized that the large softbox in the back right, serving as our key light, wasn't doing what I wanted it to (it was spilling too much on the back wall and I didn't have a grid for it) and as a result of changing that out had to adjust what all of our other lights were doing in relationship to it in this new arrangement. So there's the "best laid plans" in action for you.

Lighting our Second Shoot (Phil's Apartment) - Part 2 from T.G. Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Lighting our Second Shoot - Part 1

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We had our first two shoots of the revamped narrative photography project this past weekend. With the help of my assistant Corinne and six apprentices from the college my wife works at it took us two and a half days at this single apartment to make two photographs. Here's a quick time lapse of a small sliver of our second day as we setup the lights and set dressing.

Lighting our Second Shoot (Phil's Apartment) - Part 1 from T.G. Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Hours of Casting

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I keep the program for every play I see in hopes of someday casting the actors whose work I liked. Over the last four weeks Corinne and I called in 55 actors and actresses and spent a cumulative 31.5 hours in the audition room and a third of the people we saw were from shows I'd seen over the last three years. It's been a time consuming process, but we've succeeded in casting eleven actors and we're making offers to another ten in the next couple weeks.

Six Months of Scouting

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Why the long hiatus posting? Well, mostly I've been busy preparing to shoot. Since the summer I've scouted 40 places: 34 apartments, 4 offices, and 2 taxi depots. I shot 3,661 pictures (that sounds like a lot, but with each place having multiple rooms that's only 92 pictures per place) and printed 1,522 of those pictures as 4"x6" prints that I've been sorting through and pinning to my magnetic wall to figure out which apartments would best fit each character with the furniture already in each place. It's been good to get the pictures out of the computer and physicalize the process and we've pinned down places for several of the characters (Marc, Nandini, Phil, Liam) who I look forward to telling you more about soon.

Einstein on the Beach

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Apparently for the original production of Philip Glass's and Robert Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach Wilson raised $850,000 of the million dollar production costs, so he was still in debt $150,000 and Wilson, in sharing this fact with his non-artist Father got the response, "I didn't know you were smart enough to lose that much money." You can hear Wilson's very funny/touching retelling of that exchange here at the 7'06" mark.

We know Einstein today for all the success it brought its main creators as it's been revived numerous times, but here at the mid-point of their careers the struggle is fascinating to hear about. "The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: 'I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure,' he says, 'when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer.'1"

And while Einstein launched both of their careers, as well as performer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, it's not something you can know or plan for or expect while you're doing it; in fact it's strange to even look back on and feel like you had any idea what you were doing. I found this excerpt from Childs from last year as another of her old productions was being remounted, "Still, Childs found it 'seriously moving' to see how many dancers wanted to work on the revival, and odd that, after so many years of feeling she was inventing her career as she went along, she was now being venerated as the grande dame of a golden era.2" It's encouraging after feeling like my wife and I are both constantly making this up as we go along to hear the heavyweights we look to today look back on the early and even the mid-points of their careers and express similar sentiments to what we're experiencing now. It gives one hope through all the uncertainty and the upheavals.

So let me close with one more tidbit from Philip Glass: "One aspect of Glass's life has remained constant: 'I am still trying to write melodies which are truly beautiful and fresh and unexpected. It's very simple: I find playing music and writing music very challenging. It hasn't gotten any easier as I've gotten older. And after 50 years of composing, that is an achievement in itself. It is still engrossing enough to get me up early and keep me working all day.'3" Let us all aspire to find the work that engrosses us enough to do it every day for 50 years. And be brave enough if we're not engrossed enough with what we've put our hands and minds to doing to leave it and find the vocation that does.

P.S.

Here's a fun little video of Arthur Miller telling Robert Wilson what he thought of Einstein on the Beach.


A Mid-Journey Timeline

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Some people asked me last week about the work I'd posted in the Work in Progress category when the site launched and I realized I needed to give some clarification about the material I'm currently posting and what I hope to post in the coming months. To do that, let me give you a quick timeline of where we've been in the last year and a half since I jumped into this photo project:

  • Nov - Dec 2010: Held auditions and cast four actors to play two romantic couples.
  • Jan - April 2011: Rehearsed in my apartment as much as six days per week to create consistent characters the actors could play.
  • June - Dec 2011: Shot 19 different scenes over 12 shoots.
  • Oct - Nov 2011: Ran my Kickstarter Campaign to raise support to shoot more images.
  • Jan - Sept 2012: Wrote a 30-35 image script, at first building on and then moving past the original story to something better.
  • Aug 2012 - Present: Scouting locations to match scenes in the script and organizing shoots to execute them over the next nine months.

So despite the fact that I'm posting images I haven't made any images over the last eight months. There's been the occasional rehearsal photo, but I'd gone back to the drawing board in terms of the story (sorry if that comes as a surprise to any of you; I've talked about that a little bit in my emails to my donors). So at this point all the pictures you're seeing me post are from the summer and fall of last year, some of which I'm proud of and some of which fail to do what I'd set out to do and some of which were at least striving in the right direction with at least some elements working in their favor.

Then I'm currently gearing up to shoot the 30-35 images I've scripted into a concise, linear story with a beginning, middle, and end, something the previous images I feel lack, and we can talk about why later, so that's where I'll be putting my efforts over the next year from now until June of 2013 when I will most likely lose several of my actors to moves and changing life directions and so forth.

So part of this site and the responsibility I feel toward you, my friends, patrons, fellow photographers, and art lovers is to catch you up on where I've been in this long, long journey. The difficulty of that, however, is trying to tell you a story I'm still in the middle of and one I'm unsure of where it ends. So many of the posts over the next few months I'll share with you our process for developing the characters you see in Version 1.0 of this project, some of the crazy things we did throughout our rehearsals, and share the adventures we had in staging and shooting pictures "out in the wild." And then gradually transition to telling you about the long writing process I've gone through over the last year, how good it has been for me to develop a writing life and the disciplines that go with that, and share with you the new adventures we have making whatever Version 2.0 of this photo project looks like. Thanks again for coming along with me on this journey!

Music for Writing To

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Music has become a vital part of my writing process this year. A friend I meet with regularly about the project counseled me last month about the use of music in writing saying that several of his friends don't write while listening to music because they don't want the emotion they're feeling to come from the music, but from what's happening in the story. I find, however, in our small studio apartment that I need a pair of headphones to block out the world around me and make a safe, isolated, creative workspace for myself.

Of course, the kind of music I put on is crucial to creating the right kind of creative workspace. I've tried all kinds of genres from jazz (The Bad Plus) to post-rock (Bell Orchestre, Clogs) to film scores (Amelie, The Fountain), all of which I enjoy listening to, but for the purpose of my writing I find it all too driving and excitable to help put me in the relaxed state I need to be in to do good work. The music has to be quiet, calm, meditative, rolling, atmospheric, repetitive, moving, and emotional, simple in its instrumentation, and it can never have lyrics or the words distract me from the words I'm working to put down. So that's led me to using almost exclusively neoclassical (or post-classical) albums to write. It's generally piano driven, with strings, recorded ambient or source sounds, and the occasional electronic addition. It started with discovering Ólafur Arnalds on All Song's Considered and was quickly followed by Max Richter through, if I remember correctly, iTunes's recommendation engine. Those two will remain among my all-time, I'll listen to them forever, favorites, but it's grown over the last two years to include the following list of ten artists and thirty albums I give you now:

  • Dustin O'Halleran - Piano Solos, Piano Solos Vol 2, Lumiere, & Vorleben
  • Hauschka - The Prepared Piano, Room to Expand, & Ferndorf
  • Jean-Yves Thibaudet - Satie: The Magic of Satie
  • Jóhann Jóhannsson - IBM 1401 A User's Manual, Englabörn, & Fordlândia
  • Jonsí - Riceboy Sleeps, We Bought a Zoo
  • Matthew Robert Cooper - Miniatures, Some Days Are Better Than Others
  • Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks, Songs From Before, & 24 Postcards in Full Color
  • Ólafur Arnalds - Eulogy for Evolution, Dyad 1909, Found Songs, ...and they have escaped the weight of darkness, & Living Room Songs
  • Peter Broderick - Float, Music for Falling from Trees, Docile, & Music for Confluence
  • Philip Glass - Solo Piano, Glassworks, & The Hours

It's music that realigns my soul. It gets me to sit and stare at the page every morning for the two hours I've carved out for writing. It's a familiar friend providing just the right amount of distraction to get me past my discomfort of those first thirty minutes of not knowing what to write and trust the process that something will come today.

Imply Don't Show

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I took the script of the project from a spare 25 notecard second draft up to 37 notecards yesterday, bringing in additional notecards from my first draft, filling in between existing scenes, and trying to create a more dramatic story arc: one of the characters searching for a girlfriend to no avail and the other couple easing into a physical relationship gradually and the things they argue about. In the process I realized that I’ve been writing these moments in a representational style once again, a criticism leveled against the pictures I’ve made thus far that I agree with strongly; I’ve been saying since the holidays that I need to make pictures that are more expressive of the moment between two characters, what it is to feel and be in that moment, than the representational approach of: here this is exactly what happened. And I know the approach I use, asking myself what the next story beat is and then showing that moment happening, is the cause.

As I was going through iTunes yesterday adding music back onto my laptop I came across bluegrass mandolin player Chris Thile’s instrumental song ‘Club G.R.O.S.S.’ (a mandolin/saxophone duet no less!). Thile said that when he was writing the song he would hear in his head the next note of the melody and then intentionally chose instead the note to either side of what sounded in his head like the “correct” note. It’s a completely unsingable melody as a result, but really compelling for it as well. And I was thinking about some of the shots I did in December of one of the characters lying in bed with a girl late at night while she sleeps (or he; we did it both ways) and realized that the way I’m writing my notecard bullet points for the story is to show the story beat that seemed like it need to be communicated: the characters meeting for the first time, the characters falling in love over dinner, the characters trying to pickup someone at a bar, the characters drunkenly hooking up. Those moments as written would make images we would look at and know instantly what’s going on in them and that’s because I’m showing exactly what happened in the scene (this is what I mean by representational rather than expressive). I need to take a cue from Club G.R.O.S.S. and write out the moments in the story that are currently offscreen, that happen on either side of the moments I’ve already chosen and shoot those instead, because the moments to either side imply what happens without showing it like all the offstage action in Shakespeare’s plays that’s more graphic because we have to visualize it for ourselves. So forget the storyteller’s dictum, show don’t tell, I need to imply don’t show.