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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Long Time No Blog...

It's been almost 4 months since I wrapped up the Kickstarter campaign.
So many people came out of the woodworks to lend a hand (a buck, I mean). It was humbling and stimulating and scary...
The 2 months of heavy promotion took their toll, however, and the journey back from the extroverted, manic PR mode to a more introverted creative mode, proved longer than I expected.

Lil' scratching in B&W

I have long been toying with the idea of creating the novel in B&W. In fact it was the original plan but during the shooting phase I kept getting seduced by the tantalizing color images that were pouring onto my screen.
I have recently remarried the B&W option. Sure, it may cut down on the delicious visceral impact of each image but in the long run it will afford me greater latitude in the story telling as a whole.

There is something about the way we absorb B&W imagery which leaves our many psychological responses to color untouched and offers it's content up for a more literary engagement.
It is more like reading, less like passive absorbtion.
It's not that I have anything against color. (Anyone who's seen the way I dress knows that that is hardly the case!) This story just does not want messy splotches of vibrating somatic-state inducers interfering with it's line of inquiry.
This line of inquiry being the complimentary interaction between the cinematic moving image, indicated by the photographs, and story telling in sequential stills as executed in the comics form.

The B&W choice is also in keeping with the spirit of my homage to the original fotonovelas (also called cine'-roman and roman-photo) of the 50's 60's and 70's..

An exhilarating, celebratory look at the power of the cine'-romans of the era is Fredrico Fellini's The White Sheik (1952)


Alberto Sordi as the White Sheik with an extra. (I have no recollection of this particular scene from the film... Can anyone enlighten me?)

A fascinating experiment in still/motion subject is the short film La Jetee (1962) by Chris Marker. It's a film offered up in sequential stills. So deep is our drive to complete the actions, that shortly after watching it, I forgot that it was in stills!

A poster for La Jetee