short film

At the end of this term, I want to have made a short film with the (broad) themes of Autumn and the things it brings, and the concept of Hell (either quite literally, or some ideas it inspires). After the tryout presentation, I went out to get Dante's Divine Comedy, which I intend to read during the term and hope will inspire me to write.

I came across this video and I really like the colours. The clips are very similar to what I was imagining I would do. Personally, though, I would leave out the music and voice-over

week 1

(starting after elective week)

A new artist I discovered from a recent collaboration he did with Hozier. Again, this mv fits the idea I have for my video. I like that the camera is not placed on a tripod, so the clips are a bit shaky. This makes it feel like a home video, kind of. Looking at the lyrics, I enjoy that the lyrics are quite simple in themselves (conversational almost), but tell an interesting story.

I think the idea that being raised in a cold climate makes you a certain kind of person is an interesting one. I had been thinking of this concept for a bit already before I discovered this song (turns out it's quite famous, I'm just out of the loop). It is interesting that Hozier is on this song ("forgive my northern attitude, I was raised out in the cold/ on little light"), when his own album contains a song (to someone from a warm climate/ uiscefhuaraithe) which covers some of the same themes.

Over the Autumn break, I really wanted to pause working on the project, so I started reading a book that I was really excited about. It ended up fitting the project anyway. It is a story of a group of classics students (who are all individually quite horrible people, but who are very entertaining nonetheless), who end up killing one person in this group. It is about the dangers of doing something for the aesthetic. The first sentences of the first chapter summarise the rest of the book quite nicely.

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think mine is this: the morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."

Pretentious, but pretty and kind of relatable. The book talks of morality a lot, and so the connection to this project became clear.

Right now, I am enjoying looking at other peoples work a lot more than making my own.

week 2

On Thursday, a group of us went to a park/ forest (???) near my house to take photos/ record sounds. In my plan, I said I wanted to spend some time exploring/ familiarising with natural surroundings this week. I really liked the way the sky was behaving. The photos below are all screenshots from some videos I shot on Thursday.

The plan was to work on writing this week and last, but I could not bring myself to do it. I do believe that once I start filming, the story will start to come together, so it wasn't a very good idea to plan to do these two parts of the project in the order that I did.

I like that this video is a bit grainy and low-res. The trees are moving slowly and there is a mill turning somewhere to the right of the centre.

week 3

The plan for this week was to start filming footage for the film, but I could really not find the time for it, especially considering I want to spent at least one full day just working on that (my elective started, turns out it is a bit more intensive than the ones at WDKA). I am also procrastinating more than ever before and I don't want to assume the topic I chose is affecting me, but I do suspect it. All these things are on me of course, but I thought you should know about it anyway.

The DD week is next (great timing) and I will be a bit more disciplined, as in, waking up at reasonable times, reading/ writing for a set time, being away from the house for at least a few hours a day. I know that at the midterm (tryout) presentation, a remark was made about me making strict rules for myself, but it turns out I really need them to be productive.

Also, November 28 I will be attending a Hozier concert (!!!) and I'd like to think of some ways to incorporate this live experience into the project, or at least the process.

This week I spent some time on writing exercises, walking around my neighbourhood listening to the Unreal Unearth album, or at the gym listening to podcasts (really just the Secret History again, but now the audiobook. It is told by the writer, so quite interesting to me). I have been listening to the album a lot lately, but not really making any notes on it.

In total I have done 4 writing exercises, two after walks, one after a 15 minute meditation (unfortunately inside), and one because I felt like it. These were quite helpful, I see them as warm-up sketches. To the left there is one of the 7 pages I wrote. It is blurred, because (1) when it is displayed like this it probably won't get read and (2) there are some things written there that are not really important to the process and I'd like them to remain private. Still, I put it here to show the general way it looks.

week 4 (DD-week)

Monday/ Tuesday: Reading + walk listening to music
Wednesday: Full day excursion to Utrechtse Heuvelrug (filming)
Thursday (elective day): Writing about excursion day diary entry style + gym listening to audiobook
Friday: Reading + meditation

Utrechtse Heuvelrug

Wednesday was really quite a nice sunny Autumn day. I made the decision this week to kind of distance myself from the rule that the weather needs to be horrible for the film I want to make. In the end, the idea was to make the film about Autumnal scenes (and the story about the concept of Hell), not bad weather. This was because after a number of heatwaves, I was craving cold weather. I wanted to improvise the images when at "the location" (like a walk in the woods generally does for you) so I didn't really plan any specifics beforehand. Also, I saw two deer.

Below you will find some stills of the videos I shot. The full videos are one scene each and are a bit shaky because I held the camera in my hands (I always think this is charming in home videos). There is no talking in it, not on purpose anyway.

Diary entry

The next day, I decided to write a diary entry style story about the day

week 5

This week I spent my time analysing the footage I have so far to decide how to put them together into a video. For now, I'm thinking to "just" put each video in the order they were taken, so it actually portrays the journey I took. I do think I do not yet have enough variety in those videos, I might end up shooting some more videos during nighttime.
A theme this term has been that every time I'm not sure how to continue, I go for long walks and usually things resolve themselves. Not this week.
On Tuesday, I went to the Hozier concert in Amsterdam which was very beautiful. I don't like filming at concerts, so I didn't this time either. Something that stood out to me were the tree roots that slowly moved down from the ceiling, to make it seem like we were buried underground. Again, didn't take a photo myself but found one from that day online.

The story... I have many ideas for specific storylines, sentences, even words to be used in it, but I am having a hard time putting them together in a coherent sequence. Now I don't think it is that horrible the story isn't done yet, as I first need to put the video together anyways, but the deadline is nearing very quickly and it's making me nervous.

The reason I'm not that far into the book after all that reading yet is because I made the mistake to read the 70 page font size 9 introduction entirely (I'm a bit further into the book now, at the end of the week, of course)

Question: Last class you mentioned you could help me with ways to determine the importance of this project; could you tell me how to do this and what you think of when seeing the concept? Thank you!

week 6

The Open Atelier class at the beginning of the week was very helpful for me. It made me realise my expectations for the story were too high already, which made it difficult to get started. I wanted to completely remove myself emotionally from the project, which is not necessarily a good rule to set, even if it might appear like this once the story is done. Also, the remark about using humour to cope with the dark days made me recognise that I was taking the topic of the story too seriously.
The idea of needing to get over the fact that my personality is going to be part of the work reminded me of the song "Who We Are" on the Hozier album:

On Wednesday, there was an interesting realisation. I was thinking about Dante's exploration of Death like it is a physical space and I remembered that I had done my own "research" when I was about six years old, only in a less Christian way. I also remembered the crazy way I went about my research then, which I thought I should write down. To clarify, I like writing in the way an author writes about the lives of their characters, I am not actually this dramatic a storyteller. I think this is what I meant by having an analytical way of writing, like a disembodied presence looking out at someone else's life, or whatever. A story is just so much more entertaining this way. Even then, what I wrote really happened.

"We're born at night
So much of our lives
Is just carving through the dark
To get so far
And the hardest part
Is who we are"

Autumn is the crazy season

Childhood memories and thoughts of death

It is the most beautiful thing I've seen


When I was six years old, I thought death meant never seeing my bedroom wallpaper again. I guess I still kind of do. Heartbreaking. I thought a lot about death when I was six. It seemed like an awfully eccentric arrangement. The fact that I attended a Christian elementary school might have intensified my glamourisation of the concept, and that I had a newborn sister my dread. But I didn't believe in God, not even then. Heaven and Hell had a somewhat fictive quality. Interesting in their own way, but not quite the inevitable crash of real death.

I didn't want to die, don't get me wrong, but I wanted desperately to know what it was like. My imagination could only appease my curiosity to an extent, so I turned to the people in my life I thought were closest to death. I didn't care much for decorum then, so this is what I told them as explanation. My belief was that old people thinned out their hair so much, even became bald, so that the Universe could shine its mysteries into their brains smoothly. As such, they held the answers to the great mystery.

My grandmother told me that after death there was nothing. Dead is dead, you do not exist anymore. There seemed to be some flaws in this hypothesis (because where does the soul go? When a candle goes out, is there not smoke?), but a spiritual void in which to wander seemed likely in itself. My oldest grandfather is the youngest of his brothers and sisters by a lot. He told me to go ask his sister, she should know. I didn't know his sister. Dead end.

My other grandfather told me the strangest thing. What did I mean what happens when you die? We were all dying a little every minute, like the leaves fall before the tree is fully bare. This was a shocking statement. I stared at him. He continued. Everything we do, we do in order to distract ourselves from this fate to which we’re doomed. The final stage where everything is dark, and we have nowhere to turn safe for the promise of never having purpose again. I was astounded at this revelation. And even more at the fact that I knew all of those words. I mean, I was six. I told him his ideas were interesting and walked away. Nevertheless, of course this stuck with me. Were the princesses on my bedroom wall just there to distract me from this emptiness that had fascinated me so? The emptiness that, according to my grandfather, was part of me at all times and spreading?

Anyways, my birthday party that year was a blast, of course. I suppose this is where it starts. Blowing out seven candles on a distraction cake. When I voiced my concerns to my mother, she said that it doesn't matter if we are dying. Didn't I like drawing? I thought she was crazy. What did that have to do with anything? And didn't I like making up stories for my sister? My sister didn't understand what I was saying, and she would not remember any of my tales, yet I told them. Knowing things don't matter in the grand scheme of things makes the moments we enjoy so much more worthwhile. It was the kind of thing of thing a mentor tells the central figure in a storybook.

I don't know the end of this story (I painted my bedroom walls years ago). There is not really a resolution. It is one of my only childhood memories.

I will probably need to cut some parts out for the final version, either because they are not that good or because it makes the story too long for now. One thing I must say is that it seems strange talking of death with such lightness in the context of today. I should fix this somehow.

An answer. The story will be in English, because that is how I ended up thinking of/ writing it.

Traduttore traditore.

A 13/12 update. I wrote a different story. I thought it was too weird and tone-deaf to keep it like this. Rather than focusing on Dante's exploration of death, I decided to look at Dante's exploration of the world around him through the lense of his immediate imaginary surroundings. This does mean it became an extremely last-minute story, so I haven't had the opportunity to let the words sink in. Therefore, I might have a better version ready only after the presentation. Writing this story was a very strange thing for me because I wrote it in two languages at the same time. Sometimes I'd think of a sentence in Dutch, sometimes in English. This is why I decided to keep both languages.