Update 1

I know, I know. It's been a long time since I've blogged on L&T. Some health issues and Jason's temporary move to Melbourne to work on Adam Elliots new feature are among some of the reason I haven't been around much, but never-the-less things are moving behind the scenes and positive progress is being acheived. Jason, while preparing to move, has been working on characters and profiles and we even have a great first draft of our main character EMILY! She looks fantastic and I can't wait to see her in plasticine. I am still attempting to get Jason to say a few words on here but he is a busy man with many projects. Hopefully we can post some pics of the characters and hear from Jason in the near future on how things are developing on the artistic side of things. Until we speak again - there are still a few poems looking for directors and I know Jane is currently looking for some producers to take some of the load off of her so if you are a director or producer and interested in learning more about the Poetry in Motion series have a look at the website that is just plum chuck full of information.

Directors Vision

Firstly, I have to say as a writer and director that my hat is off to Sean Whelan who wrote the poem and of which I most definitely fell in love with. It struck me as not only perfect for Poetry in Motion – as the visuals where really all there but also as a story that could be played with and moulded to really show the characters uniqueness and that really has been my goal from the very beginning.

To transform this poem to film actually didn’t strike me as being that difficult as everything was already there – Sean had created, unbeknownst to him I am sure, a really great outline for a film.

My first impression that I felt would give the best overall freedom to do what I felt needed to be done with the story and the characters – was to make it a cartoon or animation. It just seemed to fit that niche very nicely, however the more I read it another idea started to emerge or merge I’m not quite sure which. This new idea really comes from something I always liked as a child and that was papier-mache. This idea of piles of paper and glue to make a form always intrigued me. The way very much like ideas happen – you layer, and layer until you finally have your creation. In fact, I so liked the idea of papier-mache I actually wrote a poem many year ago entitled “She lives in a World of Papier- Mache,” it was a sweet poem and I think when I read L&T it reminded me of the same feelings that made me want to write that poem. So, with that in mind it wasn’t hard to make the jump from animation to stop-animation. I could immediately see the benefits of using stop-motion as the medium to tell this story – it just fit. The surrealism of the poem and the surrealism of stop-motion is just so right.

With that now set firmly in my mind, I set out to find a stop-motion animator and it was really just a fluke that I stumbled upon Jason Lynch. I obviously wanted to go with someone local, for time restraints and I need to be hands on and know what’s going on. Perhaps had we decided to go with a cartoonist or something – I might have said we could do it via email and send me drafts but with stop-motion I felt I needed to be close to it. So while I am cruising the internet for Brisbane Stop Motion Animators I was happily surprised that not only was there quite a few but there was one who had worked on an Academy Awarding winning Feature ‘WALLACE & GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT.’ So as you can imagine, I was over the moon when he responded, and responded quite quickly to my query and he was really overjoyed at being involved.

I always wanted to stay true to Sean’s Poem . I’ve think I’ve done that. Writing a script or treatment from a poem is a lot like connect-the-dots game we played as children: you have to go from point A to point B, we all agree on those points – they are clear and definite, a writer’s job is to make a smooth and clear path to those points by being both creative and making sense/being logical, so that the transition from A to B seems almost effortless. Again, that was my goal – connecting the dots. I think I’ve accomplished that, at least I think I have.

Jason and I both had definite ideas for the film, amazingly the visions we had were quite similar. He has brought a lot to the table in respect to he never says “we can’t do that” and it sometimes surprises me all the things that are possible with stop-motion. For instance, I wanted to add the little narrator morph character in digitally in post and he said “No, we can just to this and this and it will be fine.”

I think Jason and I both felt the “eyes” of the characters should play a big roll in the telling of the story. I tried to incorporate them in an array of mediums, what I mean by that is, there are several characters you never fully see, yet somebody is always watching somebody: The character Dean is watching Emily, the roommates watch TV, Morph is watching everybody and the cat is watching Morph, one could even say that the Eiffel Tower is in a way a metaphor for watching – it’s a sightseeing monument, but even more so it is essentially a tall tower of which you climb to see a spectacular view. So, yes, I think we all agreed from the beginning that eyes where important – I wanted a lot of thought to go into the eyes and when I wrote the script I specifically wrote scenes that I felt would emphasise the eyes of the characters – especially EMILY’S.

Originally, I had some concern over how best to tell the story or to be more specific whose “eyes” would we see the story through – I always felt it would be narrated, with a voice over and my initial thoughts where – it would be told through her “Golden Friend” aka Dean, but after talking with the Poet and rereading it several times it just seemed that there needed to be a third party, someone not directly involved – yet able to see all the things that happen in the story. Yet, I wanted to make it a bit of a surprise – let the audience think it is Dean – and then they discover no, it’s not Dean because even though Dean watches Emily he doesn’t really know her – yet our narrator does. And when we find out who it is that is telling the story, I wanted that discovery to be a treat for the audience – to go on a bit of a ride with the character and discover even more about our leading lady and who in the end not only shows us more about her (and possibly something about ourselves) but who also becomes a hero.

It’s quite interesting how our little Morph Hero came to be. Like I said I was looking for a way to tell the story through this third party character and I was having a hard time coming up with something, if I made it one of her room mates then we are verging on voyeurism – and I really didn’t want to go there, the idea of a sort of guardian angel, who watches over her seemed to really gel quite nicely with the sweetness of the poem. So, I really liked that idea and as it was a little after Christmas – end of December, beginning of January we still had all the Christmas decorations up around the house and the idea of a star or star shaped character (probably came from the fact we had a star on the x-mas tree and not an angel) as this guardian angel seemed again to make some sort of sense, and I remember being in the kitchen and remembering the poem and thinking Christmas cookies/key shaped cookies and for the first time really seeing the food elements of the story, i.e. pasta Eiffel Tower, cookies/baking, even the name suggest food and beverages and I happened to look up and there hanging on the wall was this Donna Hay Calender with this photo of this wire star shaped ornament of some description and just like a ton of lead fell on me and that was it – A morphing little creature that comes to life from the pages of her calendar and as he jumps from page to page he can watch from his vantage point and tell us the story. I instantly loved it and I still do!

I think it’s a fabulous poem and will be a great film. It’s a great story and I honestly can’t wait for Jason to bring it all to life.

Lemonade and Tequila Script

The script I know has been long overdue, however even though other directors in the Poetry In Motion Series are putting their entire scripts on their blog sites I have chosen for several reason not to do so. The main reason being we have decided not to blog the script is we will be placing it in some short screenplay competitions over the next few months. The script has been so well received by those who have read it we feel if we can a attach a few awards to the screenplay itself it should aid in getting some funding. What I can tell you is the script has had several rewrites and no doubt before production is underway - it will probably have several more.

Lemonade & Tequila - The Poem

She steals EXIT signs from office buildings and she places them over the doors of every room in her house.
So that she always has a way out.
Every evening at dusk she climbs onto the roof. She tells her housemates that she’s meditating. But she secretly reads the days news events to the evening sky.
So that god can learn from his mistakes.
She wants to be a better person, but she rarely finds room for it in her diary.
During a bout of extreme boredom she built a two metre high replica of the Eiffel Tower out of tubular pasta pieces.
When her golden friend saw it he said to her, “pasta is Italian, you should have used something French.”
She told him, “you try making the Eiffel Tower out of fucking croissants.”
He acknowledged her point silently.
Then he told her, “your eyes look like crystal balls filled with lemonade.”
She replied “It’s not lemonade, it’s tequila.”
He wanted to know how she explained the bubbles then.
She told him that the bubbles were her eyes boiling from looking at the sun too long.
He knew she was bluffing and that it was lemonade and not tequila because he kissed her eyes once
and they tasted sweet.
Sweet like the cookies she bakes once a week in the shape of keys.
The key shaped cookies he knows about.
He thinks it’s cute.
What he doesn’t know is that every night before she goes to bed, she licks her finger and then she finger paints a door over her heart.
She hopes that one day the key shaped cookies will decipher the maze of her digestive system and find their way to her heart
and armed with a key shaped cookie
her heart
will finally escape
the cage of her will.