A disgruntled female carpenter becomes disillusioned with the world and paints her entire body with woodgrain to liberate herself.
About this project
I want to tell a story that reaches a wide audience, and for the first time, I feel that video is a necessary medium for me to tackle. I am in the incredible position to have a very strong filmmaking team around me, having worked in film with Court 13 (with pros like Benh Zeitlin and Ray Tintori) and having my creative community full of exceptionally talented artists who are often collaborating on film projects.
The movie is full of my art, and me, but also about making art, about creating something beyond your control, and losing control of yourself.
We are shooting on 16mm Celluloid and KODAK has agreed to sponsor the project through a matching grant that provides a donation of filmstock in proportion to what we raise here on Kickstarter. The more we raise- the more film we can shoot!
Raising questions about multiple selves and the commodification of "artist" and "woman," Pinocchio's Candy Lust is a treatise on gender in relation to artistic identity.
Gepetto
Gepetto, a disgruntled female craftsmen, is confronted with the choice between acting responsibly and hating her life or (re)producing herself as Pinocchio.
Self-Transformation
Carving a paintbrush and painting her body with wood-grain she undergoes a transformation so wild she destroys her whole village. Fleeing in fear, Pinocchio dives into a candy fountain and becomes a victim of the underwater world of candy. Playing in this narcotic dreamland until her body starts to melt away, only Gepetto has the power to save Pinocchio from death.
Fake-Italy Location
Director of Photography and Co-director Sam Kuhn will shoot 16mm film to add texture and history to the aesthetic world. When Pinocchio dives underwater, the sudden shift to digital footage will give a contemporary saturated feeling to the tempting candy world.
Prosthetic Hand
Academy Award Nominated Director Benh Zeitlin has signed on to the film as my project advisor, continuing our long time collaboration that dates back to nights working in the original Wesleyan squash Court 13.
Workman #1
Minimal but exaggerated movement, choreographed by dance artist Laurie Berg, will lend the film a unique visual style, allowing dramatic gesture to stand in for extensive dialogue.
Gepetto's Worksite
Musical Supervision by record digging DJ duo Chances with Wolves will add a strange, beautiful, foreign yet familiar score. Tone Tank is also super-excited about writing and performing an operatic track for the Workmen.
Fake-Italy: Tree Pinocchio climbs
After raising funds to shoot underwater sequences and some test footage for the project back in June, we are now preparing for the next phase of our shoot.
Underwater Swim-Through
Our principal photography is scheduled for this fall and I have already crewed up. Now we just need to raise the funds to get the biggest chunk of the project in motion. We set our goal at $18,000 as an absolute minimum. REMEMBER I have to pay about 10% of what we make in fees.
I am hoping we can manage to raise above and beyond $18,000, and really make a super strong film- which would require asking the most from my crew, which would require paying them better wages, paying my actors to miss work, hiring a script supervisor to make sure we get usable, consistent shots, and more.
This fundraising campaign does not even begin to cover the cost of post-production, editing, adding effects, finishing sound and color.
The more you are willing and able to give, the better the project will be. I am throwing myself physically, financially and emotionally into this as hard as I can, and I expect to make it worth everybody's while. Otherwise I wouldn't ask.
Discussing Storyboards with Crew
To learn more about my work you can watch this short biopic made by my collaborator Sam Kuhn. It was our first project together and he went above and beyond-- even earning some notice from Vimeo as staff pick.
Feeling moved by the tableaus of Female Surrealist painters I modeled dream sequence compositions off of the work of Leanor Fini. The brazenness and animal femaleness that I see coming out of her work, and that of other women in that period (Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington) feels relevant to me today, and I'd like to move that energy from painting into film.
Art Department
There is no archetypal artist's novel about a woman. I cast myself as both artist and art object in my own Jungian adaptation of the picaresque novel, (the original) Adventures of Pinocchio.
If you want to know more about the project, please feel free to message me and I will be happy to answer your questions.
Additionally, you can download this Pitchdeck to see more.
And if you are interested in making a tax-deductible donation through my fiscal sponsor - the Solo Foundation- you can let me know and I can facilitate that as well. THANK YOU !!!!!
Risks and challenges
Lots of special effects will be tricky and not go as planned. For this reason, I have budgeted for talented animators and digital artists to rework any ambitious sequences that read too abstractly once captured.
Being an experimental film, and long at 20 minutes for a short, making sure an audience beyond my personal network has access to the film will take research and determination.
Although this is my first film, it is hardly my first ambitious art project, and I have never abandoned a piece halfway through.
No comments:
Post a Comment