Month: June 2020

Directed by Sylvie Rokab and narrated by Liam Neeson, Love Thy Nature points to how deeply we’ve lost touch with nature and takes viewers on a cinematic journey through the beauty and intimacy of our relationship with the natural world. The film shows that a renewed connection with nature is key both to our health and the health of our planet. 

Brian Swimme PhD Cosmologist – There’s not been this kind of destruction on the planet since the time of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

Progress has its price. Duane Elgin, MA Social Scientist, NASA Consultant – Over thousands of years we’ve been progressively empowering ourselves becoming more differentiated, more identified as unique human beings but in the process, step by step pulling back from the natural world.

Dayna Baumeister, PhD Co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8 – the only way we’ll ever make it as a species in this planet is if we reconnect with nature.

Earth is here for us to use. We’ve now come to an end of that track and it’s no longer serving us. And we see, instead of dominion, we’re really participants in the natural world. And that’ coming more into alignment with some of the Eastern traditions as well as some of the indigenous traditions in spirituality.

Maybe this new deep understanding required our disconnection from nature. Maybe to reach this full understanding we had to go through this period of disconnection.

The biological revolution. The entire Industrial Revolution was ultimately about taking. Taking minerals, taking soil, taking oil, taking water. There’s a limit on how much you can take. By redefining our relation, it isn’t nature is there for us but we ultimately are part of the natural world. Our lives depend on it. And if we can quiet our cleverness and we can instead borrow the recipe instead of taking the raw materials, then we’ve entered the biological revolution. 

Kathryn Ferguson strongly recommended me this movie as a reference for the film I am making. Zabriskie Point (1970) was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Blow up is the only film I have watched by this director, so I looked into some of his directing and visual techniques before watching Zabriskie Point.

Set in southern California at the height of the late-’60s student unrest, the two main characters of Zabriskie Point exist outside the context of the reality of the country and epoch they live in. My story also creates an inside reality that seems like a parallel dystopian reality to the real world, so it was interesting to see the way Antonioni uses the place to enter this parallel fiction.

Choosing models to act in fashion films can be risky sometimes. This film also made me think about the casting, the characters in the movie are non-professional actors but you wouldn’t notice unless you’d read it beforehand.

Antonioni uses wide to extreme long shots, especially in the scenes that happen in the desert.

I would also like to mention the color palette of the movie, I think the color is an important part of my piece as I discussed with Liam in my previous tutorial. Antonioni’s palette is similar to what I would like to achieve, yet a bit more goldish and saturated.

Illumination: long shadows and backlighting

Music in Zabriskie Point: featuring the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones. Stunning final scene.

For this tutorial, I gathered more references on location (potential accommodation in the area), stylism, illumination ideas, cameras, casting, etc. to give Liam a fully visual idea of the project.

He strongly recommended me to go to the location with my DOP beforehand, as the location for the project plays an important role. I want to film long shadows and I need to know what the light is in the place. He recommended me to use an app for the sun once I’m there.

We also discussed my plans for color grading. Color is also very important in this project and in my work in general. Liam suggested I get in touch once I get the footage as he might know some people interested in working on it for their portfolios.

Liam also suggested thinking about other ideas for lighting, as projecting the sunset to create the long shadows and showed me one of his videos where they did that.

Finally, we talked about some exhibition ideas and to use the concept of the whole project to curate the way I exhibit the film and photos (if covid allows us to have a physical exhibition by the end of the year)

My tutorial with Liam was very helpful and gave me some tips and thoughts to consider for the next steps of development and pre-production.

I showed him the pitch and he gave me very positive feedback on it, he found interesting the video I remotely directed during lockdown (quarantine countrysiders) and thought it really connected with the first ideas I was developing (connection with nature).

Regarding the story, he said it looked like a speculative version of the future showing new ways of life and I really liked that. It’s like a new beginning of time that looks to the past focusing on presenting a new future.

Liam introduced me to the digital Bolex camera, the look of the footage from it is similar to a 16mm film, if I want to film on digital to have a back up this type of camera will be worth to look at.

When talking about the experiments of the biodesigner I will collaborate with (crystalizing sweat), he told me about an experiment he did years ago which consists on leaving a glass with salt and water underneath your bed every night and depending on the dreams and energy the salt will crystalize in a different way each night. I think it’ll be interesting to practice this while I work on the project and keep a visual diary of it.

I need to gather further research and visual references to give Liam a visual idea of exactly what the video is going to look like and bring it to the tutorial next week.

I looked into the MABiodesign (CSM) course’s Instagram account to find students I could talk to. I am interested in understanding more about the techniques, processes, and their thoughts about the future of this relatively new field.

The girls were really helpful and sent me a few different references and resources to continue to educate myself on the practice. When asking them about their thoughts on representation of this way of designing in media, they all agreed there is not enough exposure of it. Being a new field, that hasn’t been completely defined yet, the media hasn’t got into it yet.

I also spoke to Alice Potts, the designer I really wanted to collaborate with. I find her work really innovative and visionary and thought it was the perfect match to my “surrealist, SciFi looking” film. She thought that what I was doing was really neccessary to ensure an understanding of what biodesign is, and its possibilities in the future of fashion. I also shared with her the storyboard and visual references I have for the final piece and she agreed on collaborating with me.

Alice also suggested some ideas for the distribution of it. She’s been featured in ShowStudio before and she’s a good friend with them. I think this collaboration could be beneficial for the exposure of my work as well as hers.