Week 6 • Scary

This week, I knew what I wanted.

I knew that the music was fairly atmospheric and spooky, so a scary story with overly dramatic images would be great for the final week before Halloween. I asked Kim to write a poem, then I focused on the visuals. My goal: I'd take extreme camera angles of interesting buildings in Cumberland, then add odd shapes and movement.

I knew what I wanted. And it could have worked, too, except for one thing...

It felt too similar to last week's zombie film. The point of the 52 Weeks project is to try new things, and pull together a wide range of visual styles and ideas. It didn't make sense to have two videos that would look similar, one after another. So while I knew what I wanted, 'what I wanted' just wasn't right.

Realizing this, I went out and took photos of every building on Dunsmuir Avenue for three blocks. When I got home, I used the photos as templates for creating stylizes images of each of the buildings. I discovered that, if I loosely outlined the major shapes of each building and chose colours from a specific palette, I could achieve a visually pleasing result.

By this point the poem was written. With only the preliminary work done, we decided to go to Vancouver for 3 days, but for a project like this, 3 days is almost 50% of the time time I have to create the video. Because I 'd only just started the artwork, I was a little worried. I'd completed about 1/6th of the buildings and didn't really have the shots finalized. I had a great time in Vancouver, but I started to get concerned that I might miss this deadline.

(It's strange. Because of the nature of this project, Cumberland has inadvertently become the star of the majority of my short films. In the last month, I've learnt more about this village than I had in all the 5 years I've lived here.)

Despite going away, despite re-envisioning my idea, despite the hiccups, it all came together. I even had a bit of time for tweaking. Enjoy the video, happy Halloween and a special thanks to K. Bannerman for her delightfully disturbing poem.