◡◶▿ MAPS05 | Clunkyism
🛠️ A school of thinking and doing and, ultimately, forgetting. Building sets with junk, knocking them down again. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 5
Week 5 of “set design that folds neatly away in the mind” already? Oh! How are your sketches and sound stages looking so far? The old buildings you’ve dressed in tin foil and bubble wrap?
Before we crack on with today’s lesson, let’s recap last week’s class. We learned how:
Filmmakers can integrate cardboard scenery into their movies by reimagining it as a “fictional cardboard-like material” (FCLM).
Your FCLM demands its own fictional science - which may have knock-on effects on the rest of your world.
Your dialogue will need to change, too - if you want it to match your cardboard scenery.
When your actors struggle to adapt to the lighter resistance of cardboard walls, they create an imaginary third space for your fictions to inhabit.
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.
So! Today, we will cover the technique and style of clunkyism. A mode that was developed by the lost filmmaker Francis Dove for his UNIVERSAL EAR serial. And which my team further adopted and ‘re-clunkified’ in our attempts to re-construct episodes of that serial.
In particular, today’s micro-essay covers how:
🛒 Clunkyism involves sourcing clunky components and clunkifying your resources.
🎨 These elements are then juxtaposed - rather than combined - in clunky ways.
🥚 The aesthetic was developed as an affectionate mockery of the fragile artificiality of memory.
📐 The clunkyist mode of blunt separation and repetition begins with set design, but may be adopted by any production department from sound to finance.
Have your colleagues heard about clunkyism? Do your students know how clunkyism can help them deconstruct, reconstruct, and finally topple the diverse structures of the filmmaking endeavour? Share the knowledge! Post it to your “wall”!
Clunkyism
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The organising aesthetic principle of Francis Dove’s UNIVERSAL EAR serial is a mode of thinking, doing, and reflecting known as clunkyism.
Clunkyism involves isolating the discrete components of any aspect of a movie’s production. Each element is separated from its fellows and allowed to perform its role independently, be it a screw, a scream, or a shade of yellow.
The component may even be re-packaged or resealed. Or replaced by a more extreme, absurd, or cheap version of whatever it is. To give it added “clunk.” It might be reduced to its essence and/or used in multiple contexts as a replacement for similar components.
Sampling, reducing, repeating. No blending. No smudging. Never deliberately grading - although degradation may be inevitable.
For example:
A metal screw may be replaced by a coloured toy screw, accentuating its presence and screwness.
Every location is held together by the same set of screws, no matter how incongruous the appearance or the repetition.
A scream may be recorded in a pre-shoot vocal session, and
dropped (not mixed) into the soundtrack,
used in an unmodulated form, whatever the angle or distance, and
looped if necessary, and without smoothing, to make it longer.
A Labrador may be dyed a particular shade of yellow to remove inconsistencies across the hue of his coat.
The same yellow is used for the sun and the yellow of the hero’s eye whites.
Francis Dove developed the principles of clunkyism while making the original screen adaptation of UNIVERSAL EAR1.
Shortly beforehand, Dove had committed his wife to an amnesiacs’ hospice. Dove was left with sole custody of the couple’s memories. He monumentalised these memories by chipping, sanding, and warping them into the stage sets of his mind. Chipping and sanding away at the details and nuances.
Memories like a charity shop LEGO set. Clunky.
This clunkyness infected Dove’s screen work. UNIVERSAL EAR was an adaptation of Harley Byrne’s memoirs. Harley Byrne is notoriously definitive in his assertions. Byrne’s opinions and memories are more certain than most people. Not right, but certain.
By applying the principles of clunkyism to Byrne’s memoirs, Dove was being “sarcastic about certainty.” People say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Perhaps clunkyism is the lowest form of set design.
Clunkyist set design techniques included:
Separating
Reducing
Simplifying
Compressing
Vacuum-packing
Over-defining
(Over-defining set design means giving every set element and every prop its own over-bearing identity.)
Building each element from discarded junk or cardboard
Choosing flawed materials and tending to/accentuating their flaws
Accentuating the true identities of the materials
But sanding down their strengths
Tactility
Putting altogether too much faith in the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module.
In this way, Dove intended to:
Humanise the scientific
Devalue human logic
Dismiss any definitive reading of the text.
In fact, Dove had preferred to start with organic, storied materials. To isolate and juxtapose them. It was UNIVERSAL EAR production designer Edith Downing2 who chose to use featureless, out-of-place materials. Industrialising everything.
Straight lines.
Square corners.
Inorganic.
Objective.
Utilitarian.
Downing found the UNIVERSAL EAR project futile and pompous. But she was tickled by pomposity. And not averse to mocking the whole endeavour in her design and studio behaviour. Making giant asparagus leaves out of fibre-optic cables and cloth. Calling meetings for no purpose.
Francis Dove went along with Downing’s interpretation of his clunky notes. He went along with it because Harley Byrne’s memoirs were faulty representations of the real. As any memoir must be. The concrete manifestation of corrupt signals from the past.
Anyway, the real movie takes place not in the studio - thought Dove - but in the eyes, ears, bottoms, and brains, of the audience. In the brains, the movie crystallises as a new memory before crumbling away into the recesses of the mind.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Orange juice cans
Seems relevant:
And if you click through to see the second image, under the copyright text, they’ve written: “The art was prepared in pen and ink, with crayon overlays for the yellow, red, and black.” Great! Thank you!
Next week, we’ll learn about wallpaper. It’s all around us. And yet, it may not be what it seems!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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UNIVERSAL EAR is an adaptation of Harley Byrne’s memoirs. Byrne remembers travelling through time to record all the world’s music, returning to Manchester to make it available on MP3. Compressing and archiving. Just like Francis Dove’s memories.
I must give particular note to the fabulous illustrator and animator Elly Strigner, who helped us discover so much about Downing when Strigner was production designer for the UNIVERSAL EAR remakes.