So if all (i.e. funding) goes to plan, we’ll be making Dark Land Light House next Spring. I cannot tell you how soul-quakingly exciting that feels. As Tim’s already talked about, we’ve been working on this idea in various forms and guises since 2008, and it feels properly primed to explode right now.
Whilst we’re waiting for the ££cashmoney to come together, I’m thinking about how we’ll make decisions when it comes to production. The technical R&D we did last year was amazing in terms of generating possibility; but the one sure as hell fact we came out with was that there was no single staging configuration that could allow us to use all the effects we fell in love with.
photo: Paul Blakemore
It was quite overwhelming to go through all the a/v and written documentation straight after the R&D week. But this far distant from it, it’s interesting to feel what stays present. We were lucky to get the singularly brilliant Paul Blakemore in for a couple of days to document what we were getting up to. I’ve found myself returning to his photos over and over again. One of the most interesting things he did was get creative about how he documented. He didn’t just photograph the action dry. He took inspiration from the ideas and atmospheres we were exploring and used camera-specific techniques like multiple exposure to document the ‘sense’ of those actions as well as the practical fact of them.
It might sound counterintuitive but I’ve been finding Paul’s impossible images the most interesting ones to come back to when thinking about production decisions.
photo: Paul Blakemore
photo: Paul Blakemore
These multiple exposures are very interesting to me in terms of the notion of echoes. Ghosts that we carry with us. Captured in mechanical recording. Our weird edges.
When we were talking about visions and hauntings in DLLH originally, I was generally imagining things that felt definitively ‘other.’ Things that were scary because of their un-humanness. But Paul’s double exposures make me think instead about the fact that hallucinations are apparently common in cases of long term isolation. They make me think of the horror of losing the edges of our sense of identity. Becoming dissolved, fractured, insubstantial. The mindfuck of existing with many ghosts of ourselves. The task of keeping hold of our sense of self when we have no-one nearby to be in relation to.
Also, this photo:
photo: Paul Blakemore
Because what if? and, wouldn’t it be cool?