◡◶▿ MAPS04 | Cardboard 2
🍄 The secret family of alien materials that underpins the cinematic landscape. Plus: The lo-fi filmmaker who believes our ancestors were shrooms. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 4
Let’s hear it again: cardboard!
If you ‘tuned in’ to last week’s filmmaking lesson, you’ll already have read a couple of micro-essays about using cardboard in your set design. If you didn’t, that’s okay. Today, we’ll do part two on this topic. But you may revisit last week’s post at your leisure.
All the same, here’s a recap:
Cardboard is cheap and flexible, and it smells good.
Cardboard is an effective material for set construction because it is essentially flat, like the final image.
However, the filmmaker should mediate this flatness to conjure the illusion of space - if appropriate - in whatever manner space behaves in her movie.
A pair of NYC artist collectives pioneered an aesthetic called “cardboard consciousness,” slipping radical politics, ontological doubt, and media critique between the flutes.
Okay! Super. And today? Today, we’ll look at:
🌲 Where cardboard comes from in the origin story of your hero’s boxy universe.
🛸 What on Earth - or beyond - is “fictional cardboard-like material” (FCLM).
💬 How to adjust your movie’s dialogue to make the cardboard feel at home.
✂️ Why you might try to “rip” or “dent” your actor’s performance.
Oh! By the way. Maybe you heard that a major international website has just changed its URL? No, not Twitter, sillies1! It’s us, the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
We’ve finally aligned our URL - unfound.video - with this newsletter archive, rather than our neglected Wordpress. Just hit those digits whenever you need some filmmaking inspiration. And for the love of Elon, share it with your contemporaries!
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Cardboard trees
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module.
Cardboard is a cheap, flexible, and sustainable material with which to build a movie set. And it lends itself to many themes. Despite this, cardboard scenery remains an uncommon choice in the conventional cinema. And so, its appearance may disturb your audience from your movie’s fictions.
You may wish to disturb your audience from your movie’s fictions. To some degree. If not - or if only a little - you will need to blend your cardboard scenery in. Find a way to make the cardboard less startling.
The most convincing way to blend cardboard scenery into your movie is to alter the physical and metaphysical laws of your movie’s universe. In this way, you may convince the audience that the movie world is meant to be cardboardy.
One method is to ‘cast’ cardboard as an unconventional or alien structural material. A pretend material which is used to build rooms and furniture in your hero’s world. In this case, the alien material might have similar properties to what we know as cardboard. We call an alien material like this a fictional cardboard-like material (FCLM).
Who knows what else your movie’s FCLM can do?!
You don’t have to explain your FCLM to your audience. You don’t even have to mention it! You just have to believe it.
However, if you decide that your movie universe is built from some sort of FCLM, you should also calculate the mechanics, laws, and feelings of the tree life in your movie universe. Or the life of the being or mineral from which your fictional cardboard-like material is extracted.
Of course, the knock-on implications of such a science are infinite. The degree to which you explore the implications of a world built from fictional cardboard-like material will depend on how much time you have until the shoot, and how much other stuff you’re trying not to think about.
Cardboard dialogue
In Box Head Revolution (Set Decoration: Mark Christensen, 2002), the interiors and masks are built or ‘dressed’ with cardboard and bits and bobs of kitchen rubbish and scrap metal, and swathed in fog and grain.
Occasional exterior shots feature what seem to be ‘real world’ industrial sites. Some interiors appear to be industrial workshops, dressed with imaginary apparatus.
Despite their differences, the cardboard, bits and bobs, and industrial sites convince as common building materials of a shared world.
This unity is cemented by the soundtrack. The soundtrack is composed of various industrial materials being ‘played’ in unusual ways. One such sound could be the brushing of a copper pipe with a hardy broom. Maybe! These sounds could exist as ambient room tone or extra-diegetic music. It’s hard to tell!
In Box Head Revolution, the dialogue is also made of cardboard. “The dialogue is made of cardboard” means that it is shaped to resemble the real world, but is flappy, angular, and cheap. Flappy, angular, cheap dialogue accentuates the strangeness and rigidity of real chat. Flappy, angular, cheap sets accentuate the strangeness and rigidity of our built environment.
Using cardboard dialogue along with cardboard sets creates unity in a film. Unity, oh unity! The audience understands the physics and metaphysics of the world to be aligned. They understand that they should see the film, and perhaps the filmmaker’s conception of the real world, through flappy, angular spectacles.
The filmmaker could achieve similar levels of unity by pairing eggshell dialogue with eggshell sets, or foamy dialogue with foam sets. They would be less durable than cardboard. But if eggshell or foam is thematically apt, what choice does the filmmaker have?
Cardboard performances
Imagine you direct your actor to lean against a wall. But the set designer has constructed the wall from cardboard! Nothing wrong with that. But the actor better lean with care.
Working with cardboard sets requires a certain physicality from your cast. Each actor must modulate their balance and velocity against the reduced resistance of the cardboard environment. A master actor or trained mime might do so with convincing realism. But for most performers, it will be a learning curve.
Great! The last thing you want is your characters looking too comfortable. (Unless you do want that.)
“Learning to dwell in cardboard scenery during actual takes” can be considered an acting method in its own right. “Actor pretending to lean against a ‘wall’ made from cardboard” is just one symptom of such a ‘cardboard performance.’
What else might symptomise this acting method?
The actor instructed to struggle in their paper handcuffs but who busts through them as if they were made of paper.
Or who maintains their futile struggle for beyond a sensible duration, to fill the entire take - and then forgets to struggle at all in the reverse shot. (An acting method that can facilitate so-called paper-chain editing.)
The actor who cannot focus their gaze on an imaginary horizon.
The actor who fits their voice to the studio, and not to the set.
This performer’s strength is their ability to conjure a universe quite apart from that of the movie. A universe that is neither the world that they woke up in nor the one the filmmaker imagined for them to inhabit.
The filmmaker’s responsibility is to situate this actor’s parallel universe in the appropriate place: between the flaps of the cardboard. In a world that is neither the glossy fiction of the ideal film nor the alternative reality of the “making-of.” Rather, in the realm of the unsure, where corner shop packing tape may or may not hold the crust of the fictional world and its people together for the required duration.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Did filmmakers evolve from fungus?
While fact-checking (honestly) today’s micro-essays, I discovered that Box Head Revolution director Mark L. Christensen is now an advocate - nay, a leading theorist - for the “human fungus” theory of evolution. Okay!
His book is “a collection of facts, evidence and events that support the thesis that all life generated on Earth is one very large and very old “fungus” of which humanity is ultimately the spore.”
I don’t have the time (or the courage) to read up on this. But if anyone wants to make a school report on the connection between lo-fi filmmaking technique and primordial shroom life, the class would love to see it.
After all, if we’re eventually to swap cardboard for mycelium brick, it would be good to know if that brick is made from the fibres of our ancestors. It would be good to know the thematic implications!
Next week, we’ll learn about clunkyism - real world minecraft for dogs? or ecologically sound set design for the emotionally bankrupt filmmaker? It’s a matter of perspective.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Inappropriate in the modern classroom?