◡◶▿ MAPS01 | Empty sets
🏚️ Your actors have vanished, leaving your set design naked in the snow. Hope you designed it thoughtfully! | Summer term begins. + Tell me about your film. | Maps, Flaps & Infinite Wallpaper Week 1
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Hello, dear friends. Hello, dear strangers! We’re all film students, whether we know it or not. Which is perfect, because it’s the first day of summer term at our absurdist film school, Unfound Peoples Videotechnic (UPV).
As with the previous three semesters, summer term will consist of 12 weekly sets of micro-essays on a fixed topic. Each email, and each micro-essay, works as a standalone unit. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it. Which means you can ‘dip in,’ fall behind, cross-reference, and expand or contract your learning as you wish.
This term’s topic is Maps, Flaps, and Infinite Wallpaper: set design that folds neatly away in the mind.
And if you’ll excuse me for repeating myself - you always excuse me for repeating myself 🙏 - here are some highlights of the forthcoming module I picked out in last week’s post:
How to design the bottomless pit into which you'll toss your actors, and why to use plasticine.
Clunkyism: the power and pathos and affordability of wretched materials.
Set as city, city as map, map as narrative, and narrative as set design.
Open worlds, filler areas, and mirror diegetics.
In today’s lesson, we will discuss:
🤠 A thought experiment: what might happen if you peel the actors off your image?
🎨 The guiding principles you might choose when sketching your set design.
🍮 The need to build wobbliness into your movie’s physical world from the start.
🧱 The power - and powerful weakness - of different design materials.
Thank you to those students who shared the school URL following last week’s request. This newsletter only grows when you share it. And without growth, the school withers. I wither!
Let’s get into the good habit of sharing these posts with your weirdo colleagues, corrupt networks, and nosy parents throughout the summer semester.
And if it’s the start of term at your IRL film school, too, why not gain ‘campus cred’ among your fellow students and professors by sharing it with them?
Ok. Class begins. Term begins!
Empty sets
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Thought experiment: imagine that whenever an actor dies, their image evaporates from the movies in which they had appeared.
At first, the characters played by surviving cast members are left talking to thin air. Gradually, every movie quietens as its population fades. Only the props, locations, and light remain. Lonely dollies through abandoned sets.
Would your film still embody its current? If this happened? “Embody its current” means “look like its essence.” Or would your movie look like outtakes from a real estate agent’s hard drive: aimless tilts and pans of empty, anonymous rooms?
Maybe your movie is about an estate agent. If it isn’t, you will want to push your set design further than the average videographer. To push beyond bland photography of the found. To design beyond magnolia walls, tasteful objects, and common ideas.
To do this, first identify the relationship between your film’s production design and the other elements in the film’s current.
For example, production design may seek:
To map the movie's physical or emotional universe for the viewer's convenience.
To package the components of the movie as discrete ideas.
To express the feelings of the character(s) or filmmaker.
Or, if things go awry, the production designer.
To junk the psychic detritus of the characters, filmmaker, or location.
Maybe the thought experiment is morbid. Perhaps the actors evaporate from their movies for a nice reason. Perhaps they reappear (condensate) somewhere lovely. (What is that place like?)
Thinking like this helps you to conceptualise your production design. When you have finished conceiving, you may start sketching↓ ideas. Or, you may sketch during conception. Each order of affairs has its own advantages.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module. The term is hyperlinked if it has already been published. An arrow↑↓ indicates that the referenced instruction can be found in the present lesson; if you haven’t passed it yet, you may prefer to wait rather than rush ahead.
Sketching
Choose the appropriate medium to sketch your movie’s art design. The appropriate medium might be pencil, plasticine, sand, or Fuzzy-Felt. Do not begin to design until you have chosen and acquired the right materials. This is because the material you use will affect the way your movie looks and feels.
This is doubly the case if your sets will be digital. If your sets will be digital, you should find a way to make them digitally wobbly. The world is wobbly and cinema is wobbly and our souls are wobbly. A good definition for ‘set design’ might be ‘the modulation of luminous wobbles within a moving picture.’
Maybe not. Maybe that definition can be applied to any aspect of film production, including directing, acting, and so on.
Volodymyr Nanneman’s sets were wobbly because they were suspended from the air. His buildings and props kissed the ground lightly. The images that he made were then scanned into a computer so that they could be rearranged digitally. But they never lost a sense of respect for the force of gravity.
Some say the reason Nanneman hung his sets in the air is because he spent half his childhood upside down on the trapeze. What do you think?
Modelling
When you have finished conceiving your production design, you may start sketching ideas. Do not begin to design until you have chosen and acquired the right materials. That might be pencil or paint and paper, or it might mean manipulable materials such as clay or ice. Sketching with materials that reach or recede into space is called ‘creating models.’
Creating models of your ideas helps you to imagine space and movement. Even switching from pencil and paper to Fuzzy-Felt or collage can prompt you to imagine enticing flaps and folds.
Of course, it is possible to use a computer to create 3D models. But the lessons you learn when you spill tea on your models will be very different.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Tell us about your film
I had an idea about your film.
Those readers who’ve subscribed to this odd film school and who usually open the emails probably have something in common. Creatively or imaginatively, or what have you. And perhaps you would like the chance to see your classmates’ movies or to share yours with the group.
So, let’s make a little trial this term. When you have a public screening coming up that you’d like the class to know about, please reply to one of my emails (your reply will go just to me).
Tell me the name of your film and when/where it will show, and include a synopsis of one or two sentences. Perhaps an image. Perhaps a link! Don’t forget also to say, “hello.” “Hello, Principal Cole,” will do. Or “hi graeme.”
I cannot guarantee to share your news in class. I’m usually a bit of a fluster ahead of lecture time. And after, and during. But I will try! Try to include the information in a Monday morning lecture-email.
Some of you will have films that are going to tons of festivals. The “hotshots.” You don’t need to share every screening, but if you have one or two of importance, please send me the details. Tell us what’s happening!
The class is still just small enough, and just big enough, that it could work.
If you haven’t made a film, but you’ve written or curated or painted or calculated or given birth to something relevant to the school ‘ethos,’ I’d love to hear about it, too. Expanded cinema. Expanded person!
Ok. We’re back! And yet fading? Next week, we’ll talk about space. Not outer space. Just space. The place where all the stuff goes!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
