Delivery of the beta version of the 1st film

Today I delivered the beta version of the first film.

This version was delivered with a black background, but this background will be replaced with something more dynamic in the alpha version, like a tide cycle or some minutes of film with the surf.

Following the idea that there should be an idea of a day passing by through the films, this film will be set at 8 am.

This means I will shoot a small area of the surf around that time as a background for the sequence of photos that tell the history of whale hunting.

Getting what's already tough, tougher

Games are made of rules and rules don't hinder creativity or objectivity, they stimulate it. Rules make things more interesting and hard.

A long time ago, I decided to offer myself a present on my birthday and it happened to be Ulysses by James Joyce. By coincidente, all the action of the book happens in my birthday.

But I don't want to write about coincidences (do they exist?), but instead about the structure of Ulysses.

The book follows one day and each chapter has an hour of the day, a colour and it even follows the Odyssey by Homer.

Well, let's follow Joyce: each film will have an hour of the day and a colour. I may be literal in the interpretation of these premisses, but that won't happen a lot. The effect of these rules must be subtle, can't disturb the objective of the film and should make it a richer experience for the viewer.

A bigger challenge would be to follow a masterpiece, like Joyce did. Instead of a book, I propose myself to follow what I believe is the most inspired album of all time, Hounds of Love, by Kate Bush. When I say "follow", I don't mean to use the songs as soundtracks, I just want to get ideas and emotions from the music and lyrics.

The correspondence between product 1 and the 1st song of the album is completely straight. The album opens like this:

It doesn't hurt me
Do you want to feel how it feels
Do you want to know, know that it doesn't hurt me
Do you want to hear about the deal I'm making

You
It's you and me
And if I only could
I'd make a deal with God
And I'd get him to swap our places

Kate Bush - Running up that Hill
Enviado por scopitones

What can I say after this? This is the voice of the whales. There's forginvess and at the same time, an appeal to empathy and understanding.

I don't believe in coincidences and I believe that the album will help me find my way through these 11 films. Further more, the 1st song of the 1st album by Kate Bush opens with the sound of whales. In Hounds of Love there is also sounds of whales, but in an homeopathic dose, in the 11th song.

A few years ago I tried to put another song by Kate Bush, Brazil, in a small scene I had done with a couple of killer whales. The sync between the movement of the whales was so great even in the smallest details, that I knew I had to finish the full video clip for the whole song.

Later, this video clip became important in getting this 11 films comission.


Killer pas de deux from Light Search on Vimeo.

Cohesion

I found this image and I would like to mention the proper credits, but I don’t know who’s the author. There’s a problem in the interpretation of water depth, but it’s amazing just the same.

I’ll take the opportunity while things are in their early stages (this is the best time to have a more global vision of the project), and I will dedicated this post to the cohesion between the films.

This project includes 11 films about whales and the men that hunted them. It will be very easy to end up with a very loosely connected set of films.

It’s one of those things... If that happens, no one will complain, but it doesn’t happen, the results will be much better.

It’s also true that the majority of museums don’t think about this thoroughly. They group whatever they have to show and put it all into a logical sequence, at most.

But these are films. They can end up with very different styles, to start with, just because the themes are considerably varied. Further more, some films are historical, others are documentaries, some are children tales and others are adventures (not even mentioning that one of them isn’t even a film, it’s an interactive stereoscopic 3D application that scares the s$#t out of me).

I will also be tempted to make something completely different after finishing each film.

So, I started to think about ways of connecting all the films without changing much of the scripts. I wrote “started”, but to be honest, I juts started to thing about it.

I can’t do much about colour. The films have a realistic style and the most I can do is to “beautify” things a little.

Narration... the first temptation would be to have just one narrator for each language (and all the films must be available in 5 languages). But I think that if there are two well “coupled” masculine and feminine voices, the cohesion is not affected and it will lessen a bit of the autistic load of spending a couple of hours in a museum with a pair of headphones in your ears, hearing just one person.

The soundtrack has a huge role here, although the audience and even many directors normally underrate its importance. Music can work as a connection element between all films, but this is a subject I will focus on a separate post.

Animals

My dog saw a cat when we were returning home. She silently ran towards the cat and the cat desappeared in the dark.

I then recalled that she had killed a cat before. And suddenly, I knew how to deal with these films. I mean, I didn't find anything new, but I just remembered: there's nothing more artificial than the concept of artificiality itself.

We define a boundary: We, the humans and they, the animals and this is a very narrow way of looking at ourselves and at the world.

Where am I going to with all this chitchat? To the solution on how should I face these first films the deal with whale hunting.

I will look at men as part of Nature and when men hunt whales, I will judge them as I judge any other animal that preys another. That will be my limit.

There is surely many other ways of dealing with this subject. My excuse to somehow avoid this issue that I'm having trouble dealing with, is that there is something poetic, universal and reconciling in dealing with men as with any other animal.

May be some will find this insulting, it's not my intention at all.

Film 01 - The techniques

After all, it seems there was no sympathy for the whales. There was the thrill of the hunt and the animals' size was not enough to make the whalers reach the realms of empathy.

Today on a tv show the hostess said as joke that "it's like when you put a lobster into boiling water, it makes these littles noises like it's screaming.". I liked very much that hostess, but that's it. I knew she had ruined it. TO forgive cruelty towards animals is something beyond my ability.

Let's see if I find a way to deal with this subject.

In a film there are different voices: image, narration and music are the main ones for me.

This film doesn't have a narration and it's the first film the visitors see in the museum. It has black and white photos and color photos, and I don't think it's a good idea to convert the color photos to black and white. In some color photos there's blood in the water and in the air, the bursts out of the blow holes of the wounded animals.


These black and white photos that I got from the web seem to work ok over the background with round rocks. I think that the color photos will work too.

Images tell their story and music will react emotionally to what's being told. Music can react in many ways and we're not obligated to choose a specific one: it can show the excitement of hunting, the danger and the pain, sometimes in a sequence, other times simultaneously. And music will be conscient that this film is an overture.

Fishing was a more irregular source of income that whaling, so whaling is remembered with some nostalgia in the village.


Over 90% of the hunted animals were spermwhales. They don't sink and they are not as fast as the baleen whales. Right whales (one of my favorites) was slow, but they were nearly extinct in the XIX century.



Spermwhales have a defense behaviour that helped the whalers: when a member of the group is in danger, the group gathers around him. This way, the whalers could easilly kill a whole group.

At a certain point, they started to let the young animals go. They required almost as much work as the adults and the profit was much less.

When they started to use a canon with the purpose of hunting baleen whales, things didn't get better, the ship wasn't fast enough to chase the whales.

It's said also that the man that operated the canon had a hard time hitting the targets. He not only missed the animals, but he also scared the men in the smaller whalers boats, that were not confident at all in their colleague's skills. And it's good to have in mind that we're talking about explosive harpoons.

In the beginning, men would approach the whales silently, with sails and rows. This had some disadvantages. The men got tired and since the man that threw the harpoon was also helping his mates, when he was throwing the harpoon or the spear, he wasn't very effective.

The most successful technique appeared with the use of motors in the whaler boats: the siege. The whaler boats scared the whales into shallow waters with the noise of the motors and the killing would take place near the shore.

Film 01 - Pain and empathy

Outside, a pig is being killed. I’ve been hearing his screams for some time now and not even the sound of the tv covers them.

Pain was invented in the early stages of evolution. The amount of pain that there was, there is and has yet to come in the world, only allows us to care for our own, or at most, with the pain closest to us in time and space.

It depends on the distance we are watching things. A battle between two armies, if seen from far, from the top of a hill, can easily be an aesthetically pleasing experience, such as the effect of napalm, seen from a plane.

The boats enter the water, the men row towards the place where the whales were seen, later they will simply turn on the engines, launch the first harpoons, later they will shoot a canon.

The feeling that prevails here is also ancient: the excitement of hunting and danger.

A more recent feeling may be the feeling of being part of a group.

Even more recent may have been the sympathy for the suffering of the animal that was bleeding while it was harpooned till it died. But I don’t think this was true… or may be it was, in the middle of this turmoil of emotions. I’ll try to find out.

Size matters and the sympathy we feel for the suffering of another being depends on its size. We don’t feel the same watching a 5cms fish die, a 50cms, a 120cms dolphin or a 20 meters whale. But it doesn’t end here, of course.

This has a lot to do with empathy, with similarity. And behind all this, there’s culture and education.

It’s hard for me not to label all this concern about protection of whales has hypocrite or at least, inconscienct. Whales live all their live in their habitat. 99% of the animals bred as human (and other animals) food, have the most miserable life one can conceive, and just because their death does not include a few hours of suffering, all their lives are constant suffering.

The pig is now silent and I’ll shut my mouth for now too.

Film 1 – Whale hunting – Evolution of the techniques

What an excelent subject for a guy like me, that turns his back whenever he sees someone fishing.

This film is by far the simplest of the 11 films, technically speaking. It consists on the exhibition of a set of photos:

Sequence of photos and video excerpts, showing the main hunting methods used in Madeira Archipelagos with artisan whaling boats. Whaling with sailing boats and rowing boats vs whaling with motorized boats.

My first idea is to film the rocky shore with round rocks as a background. It’s the area where sea and land meet, the whale’s world and the man’s world. On top of that, I will place the photos and videos.

In order to incorporate the feeling of time going by and to mark each period, I thought about 3 options:

- The obvious, which is to film the shore from morning till night;

- To show a complete tide cycle. In this case, it would be very interesting to show the natural ponds in front of the museum;

- To film the shore, zooming in or out.

This set of films will be in permanent exhibition at the Whale Museum, at the village of Caniçal, Madeira Island, and I think it would be interesting to frame the history of the whale hunting techniques inside the history of the village. The village only gained road access in the 1960’s, before that it was an island inside the island.

I think this can be done in a dozen of seconds. To show how was the village before the whale hunting started and what changed in the village after the whale hunting ended in the early 1980’s.

It’s needless to say that this is a personal blog: these are just my thoughts and they don’t reflect the official positions of any institution. It’s just a way of making me keep my head above water in a creative and pragmatic sense.