Production of a Portfolio Film – Post #5 Concept Development
Introduction (continued)
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, the first section of “Return to Hope” will be structured in a very similar manner to most contemporary films. This part of the film will be considered the setup (or introduction) to what comes after it. It will act to setup the confrontation (middle section) and together with the middle section, the introduction will pave the way for, and justify, the resolution (end). All three sections will be of equal importance, and I intend to give them each enough unique visual and audio content to allow them to stand alone on their own merits, but I will also employ enough ideological connectivity within the three sections to bolster the film’s comprehensiveness as a cohesive and holistic production. I will venture to say that “Return to Hope” is to be a micro-movie trilogy, where all three movies may be viewed within a nine-minute time frame. As I’ve already stated, I will be pushing boundaries.
“Portal?” This tree is located directly across the street from Hope Mill. The house may have been the mill owner’s home. As a boy, I always wondered how the arch was formed. Back then I wondered about so many things. It was the wonder years, for sure!
In the last journal entry, I revealed that the opening narration for the film would be iterated by trees. The following is a rough version of what the trees will be communicating to us through “Return to Hope”.
Narration for Intro to “Return to Hope”
(Voiceover will be digitally altered to simulate multiple trees speaking to us)
Humanity’s strategy for the demarcation of time is intrinsically flawed, and therefore illusory.
Humans are inclined to seek the beginnings and the endings of every event in their short lives.
Our own perceptions of time and space are nonlinear, more cyclical and wavelike in nature.
We perceive an infinite multitude of singularities expanding and contracting presently.
It is always the present moment for us. There is no past or future event that concerns us.
All is unfolding precisely as it is meant to, and we trees have no desire to control potential outcomes.
We are one with all that is, all that has been, and all that will be, as it rises and falls, ad infinitum.
These lines will be delivered slowly and deliberately to the rhythm of film clips that are materializing and dissolving at a peaceful and calming rate. The imagery will alternate between film clips of magnificent trees and the now deteriorating Hope Mill. One of the elements that will draw the two subject matters together will be the vegetation that is already starting to reclaim the mill and its outbuildings. Besides the narration, I intend to include a soundtrack that is suggestive of lapping waves (slow and steady), or the inhaling and exhaling sounds of deep meditative breathing. In foresight, I am predicting that the most difficult aspect of this approach to the introduction will be in its execution. What I mean by that, is that I’ll want to sustain the slow-paced tempo for as long as possible (hopefully three minutes) without losing the attention of my audience. If I can accomplish this, I feel that the audience will come away with a better understanding of how trees might be perceiving the world around them, and how their perceptions might persuade humans to be more cautious in their actions moving forward.
“River of Roots” Photo taken at the Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida
In the next journal entry, I’ll wrap up my current thought process on the first section of the film and move into an explanation of the confrontation (middle section) of “Return to Hope”. Thank you for reading the Grand Providentia United online journal. I very much appreciate your presence here!
Production of a Portfolio Film – Post #6 Concept Development
Introduction (conclusion)
Before I move on to a discussion of the format for the confrontation portion of this film, I’d like to linger a little longer on the Setup (introduction). It is crucial to the intellectual and emotional impact of this film, that I manage to successfully capture a believable representation of how trees might be perceiving our human behaviors. Human beings have an incredible potential for the formulation of ideologies and philosophies that are beneficial to every life form on the planet. Conversely, humans also have the unsettling propensity to conceive of ways to destroy or dismantle every beneficial creation they’ve ever conjured. I can entirely imagine the trees standing by silently, bearing witness to these two opposing human traits, shaking their crowns in frustration and disbelief, while their human counterparts are building up and tearing down entire empires, sometimes within a few short centuries. It has become obvious to me that the trees are in it for the long run. They would continue to grow and multiply for the good of mankind, if we would simply allow them the space and liberty to do so. The trees and all the other forms of vegetation on the Earth, are acting as one enormous filtering system for our air and water. Shouldn’t we at least express our gratitude to the plant life on our planet by not clear-cutting forests or eradicating entire ecosystems?
“Preservation” Photo captured at Trexler Nature Preserve, Schnecksville, PA (2021)
I was recently gifted a book titled “What We Owe the Future” by William MacAskill. The author is a 35-year-old philosopher who is currently an associate professor at the University of Oxford. The book cover’s bio on MacAskill asserts “At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world.” I would venture to say that it’s monumentally fitting for this young man to have achieved so much intellectual success so early in his life, as it appears to me that the younger generations are growing tired of outdated ideas and worn-out excuses. Young people are increasingly becoming the champions for an evolution of thought and action that may be able to turn this world around; set it on a course that is more sustainable and less self-destructive. Presently, I’m only fifty-five pages into the reading, and with all honesty, I can profess that I have never read a book that was more relevant and resonant to the current state of my mind and spirit than this one is. I’ve read books recently that have quoted certain scholar’s opinions that philosophy was “dead”. That modern philosophers were just parroting the works of the “greats” like Socrates and Aristotle. They went on to opine that there were no new philosophical ideas being generated, and that we had taken the entire pursuit of philosophy to its natural conclusion. In my admittedly uneducated opinion, I would say that William MacAskill has proven these particular skeptics wrong.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who believes we can change the course of this world for the good of all.
In the next online journal entry, I’ll start to describe the content of the middle section of “Return to Hope” and explain how the introduction sets up the confrontation taking place in the second section, which will then be resolved in the third and final section of the film. I also have a couple of artworks to offer up to financial supporters of the Grand Providentia Projection. I’ll be posting those within the next few days. Thank you for spending some of your time reading here. I truly appreciate you all!
Once again, I’ve neglected my commitment to those of you who are regular readers here. In a previous journal entry, I wrote about my intentions to document the making of the “Return to Hope” film in real-time on this blogsite. A few days after setting that intention, I realized that it was non-sustainable with regard to my energies, at least for now. The motivations I had for setting the intentions were sincere, in that I wanted to practice the process I intend to use for future filmmaking upon graduation from Savannah College of Art and Design. To be more specific, the process I intend to use for the “Grand Providentia Projection – A True Story, as Yet Unfolding…”, is directly related to what I was attempting to do here with “Return to Hope”. This post-graduation, master work, will be produced and promoted as a real-time documentary series that follows the progress of creating and installing, major collaborative art projects around the globe. These “Projections” will act as focal points for raising awareness of the conscious connection that exists between all sentient beings on our planet, and furthermore, how that conscious connection might be used to set positive collective intentions to restore and preserve our environment and heal divisions and discord within the human race. As this rolling documentary is being produced, there will also be a fictional version of the same story being filmed simultaneously. Eventually, the two stories will be merged and integrated into one production – a surreal documentary, with elements of both fact and fiction. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve been studying, and living by, many of the philosophical explorations that are the basis for metaphysics and the metaphysics of science, so I am convinced that this film format, the surreal documentary, will be the most powerful way to present the “Grand Providentia Projection – A True Story, as Yet Unfolding…” I must admit that it’s true, this endeavor is an enormous undertaking, but having worked on it for many years now, I know that its potential for realization is eventual, and quite possibly, inevitable.
You might be wondering why I decided that it was non-sustainable for me to document the making of “Return to Hope” here on the blog, as I produce it? The straightforward answer to that question is that I do not have the level of energy required to complete all the necessary tasks with even a modicum of success, therefore I’ve opted to prioritize my efforts, in an effort to accomplish some tasks with greater success. Since the moment that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in film, I’ve bought and learned how to use a digital film camera, conceived of “Return to Hope” and strategized its visual presentation to an audience (the admissions board at SCAD), filmed on location in Hope, RI, Bethlehem, PA and Savannah, GA, and I am currently editing the film in DaVinci Resolve, an editing software that was included with the Blackmagic Design camera that I bought back in April of this year. It sure has been a learning experience for me, but I can tell you with absolute honesty that I am loving the journey so far!
Photo shot on location at the Steel Stacks, Bethlehem, PA. The Steel Stacks is one of the locations where I filmed clips for “Return to Hope”Worthy of note: This pulley wheel is approximately 12′ in diameter and there were about 20-30 of them lined up in a humongous building!
There is another reason that I decided not to continue with the documentation on this blog. I wanted to introduce the final results, all polished and pretty, of “Return to Hope” to you all, once it is completely finished. So far, I’m super pleased with how it’s coming together! If nothing else, it is sure to be visually compelling. And fear not, you won’t have to wait long for the premier of this film, because I need to have it ready for delivery by 2/2/2023. I’ll be publishing it on YouTube as soon as it is delivered to the college. Stay tuned, dear readers, soon you’ll have more to look at than just still images! I promise.
Danger!There’s always someone trying to keep you from going someplace!
Fresh Perspectives Harvested ~ Post 1 – Introduction
If you are one who has never wrestled with low self-esteem, and if you’ve never felt unworthy or even felt a little less worthy than others, the topic of discussion in the following blog entry may seem trivial, and quite possibly, utterly meaningless. As such, it may be frustrating to read this in its tediousness. If it annoys you or you simply cannot relate to it, then it must mean that it isn’t time for you to read it, or at least not in this moment it isn’t. You are always free to surf away to another site, as I’m sure you are aware. The freedom of expression that I enjoy as being the sole author on this site is, in my own estimation, earned by being honest with myself and you all. So, this journal entry is where I intend to earn some of that freedom.
There were two separate occurrences that arose during the past week and each of them pointed directly to my continuing struggles with self-worth. I’ll only be discussing one of the two situations in detail on this blog, because the other one involves personal family matters, and therefore, private relationships. The peculiar thing is, that the family issue that happened later in the week, pointed to how far I’ve come on the journey toward healthy self-esteem and the other one, at the beginning of the week, showed me how far I have yet to go. Due, in part, to my history of painful experiences in dealing with self-worth issues, I’ve apparently adopted the automatic expectation that the events should have transpired the other way around. In other words, first would come the uplifting circumstance, and after that would come a lesson in humility to knock me down a couple of notches. Put me in my rightful place, so to speak. I’m beginning to understand that humility and self-esteem are not mutually exclusive, though. A person can have a high and healthy self-esteem, while also being humble in spirit, thus feeling no better and no worse than anyone else.
I chose this photo and the one at the top of the page because I felt as though they were representative of times when I was feeling good about myself and thinking that I had overcome all the problems concerned with low self-esteem. Read on, if you want to know my true feelings about these particular photographs.
Let’s back up to early last week. I started a new job last Monday as a second shift employee in a local warehouse. I arrived on time at 3:30 PM, because I’ve been conditioned to believe that promptness demonstrates overall integrity and an upstanding work ethic. Being prompt is also a courtesy that I asked for from the people that I employed at Moore Art Expressions. More often than not, I didn’t have to say anything about being on time though, because we had so much fun being there and being creative, that most employees preferred to come in early and leave late. At least, that’s the way I remember it. And yes, I am allowing myself that short digression. Now, back to last Monday. I was having some serious misgivings about accepting the warehouse job during the hours and days before I walked into the building, but I chalked that up to dreading the actual labor and fearing that I was too old to handle such a strenuous job. I am about to be fifty-nine years young, after all. In the past several months, I’ve remained focused on eating well and stretching and exercising daily, and as a result I’ve been feeling better physically than I have in the last decade. As I am writing this down tonight, I can see where my dread and fear were not only well founded, but more precisely they were intuitively realistic. The job description online didn’t attempt to gloss over any of the gory details of the work, so I knew reasonably well what to expect. I would be unloading boxes by hand from overseas containers, some in excess of 50-75 lbs., and loading them on to a conveyor belt in a non-climate-controlled environment. Many of you may be wondering whether I’ve lost my mind. Wondering why I would accept a menial labor job like this, especially considering the expertise I’ve attained in the molding and sculpture casting industry. As it often seems to be, the answer to that question is complicated, so I’ll come back around to it after describing what happened next.
Photo: Chris, Morderchai and Fred worked tirelessly in scorching Florida heat with me to cast 100 of these life-sized dog sculptures. It was a difficult learning curve to master the process, but we each became extremely skillful at performing our individual tasks as part of a unified team. In retrospect, I must conclude thateach of us personally enjoyed certain aspects of working on the project and we each considered other aspects of it, well, not so enjoyable.
Monday, my first night working at the warehouse, went fairly well, all things considered. The air inside the shipping containers was much hotter and more humid than I expected. The hot sun of the Savannah daytime hours had really settled in on the interior of the steel box, and the seawater that had seeped its way inside and saturated many of the cardboard boxes had no place to evaporate to, so as soon as I started moving, I started sweating. I kept moving. I was trying to pace myself, but I was also trying to prove myself. The conveyor belt was demanding to be fed and I kept feeding it. I unloaded 1,400 boxes to empty the first 40-foot container in about three hours. There were many times during the first load that I needed to cool my body and hydrate, so I walked outside the box and just inside the warehouse to take 30 second breathers. It was still very hot inside the warehouse, but rather than 110 degrees Fahrenheit it was more like 90. I finished off the shift on Monday moving from one container to the next, sometimes with help from coworkers when the boxes were oversized or heavy, and sometimes moving them on my own, until at last, the midnight hour arrived. I drove home for some highly anticipated sleep.
Photo: Another contract that I truly appreciated for seven enjoyable years during the Moore Art Expressions days, involved the restoration and upkeep of patinas on 24 monumental bronze sculptures for Raymond James Financial in Saint Petersburg, FL. The bronze sculpture photographed here is titled “Invocation” by the sculptor Buck McCain.
I returned on Tuesday afternoon, a little bit tired but still determined to prove my physical abilities to the team. As I got busy moving boxes, I had to keep reminding myself of the lessons I’ve learned over the course of thirty years in the blue-collar workforce. Lessons learned about keeping a reasonable pace no matter how fast others appear to be moving; about not comparing myself to others around me, they have their strengths and shortcomings just as I do; about not needing to prove myself to anyone other than myself; and most important of all, about taking breaks as often as you need to when you’re performing strenuous work in extreme temperatures. All of these thoughts were running through my mind, but my body seemed to have a different strategy it was running with regardless of my mind’s considerations. My body continued to lift and release boxes onto the conveyor belt. As many of you may have already surmised, I was soon overcome by heat exhaustion. My head was spinning, and I nearly passed out a number of times before they rang the bell for lunch break. I ate a little bit of food, but it tasted like poison, so I stopped eating and lay down on the picnic table bench for the remainder of the break. When my thirty minutes were up, I went right back to unloading the container where I had left off. Looking back on this it seems like complete foolishness. I was already having all of the symptoms of heat exhaustion and the potential of dying from heatstroke was growing more likely by the moment. I would like to report that I informed the warehouse managers of my condition and then I went home for the rest of the evening, but I did not. I would also like to tell you that I didn’t understand what was happening to me; that I did not know about heat exhaustion or the type of symptoms one might experience when they’re suffering from it. I would be lying to you all, if I made those false claims. Having worked in southwest Florida in extreme heat conditions for over a decade, I am fully aware of the symptoms and potential health risks that come along with heat exhaustion. Even having all this first-hand knowledge, I continued working hard until midnight and went home to get some rest.
I suppose this is a good place to end the narrative for today. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the story and explain why this incident and the other one involving my family were not only interrelated, but they seemed to be fully entwined, and together they rang out a resounding wakeup call to my body, mind and spirit.
My current feelings about the top two images – The top one was taken during the peak of our successful times at Moore Art Expressions. I had nine team members working with me to help raise us to that level, so I always felt a bit uneasy about being the public spokesperson when the media asked for an interview. As for the second photo – I swear to you, it was the photographer’s idea! I would have never agreed to it if he didn’t suggest that I might become endowed with superpowers following the shoot! In all seriousness though, I look back on those times with sincere gratitude and appreciation for all the good times we experienced together in the MAE studio!
Below is a link for those who would like to see more photos and videos of the work we did at Moore Art Expressions. The business website was taken down when I closed the business, but this Facebook page will give you an overview of the art we made there.
During the second night of my new job in the warehouse, I crossed the threshold of being a dedicated company employee and passed deep into the territory of being a foolish steward of my own sacred temple (body). I was now suffering from heat exhaustion. When I left the warehouse last Tuesday at midnight, I remember thinking I would be okay, everything would be okay, I just need to get home and get a good night’s sleep. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. When I crawled into bed after a cool shower, I was so disoriented, nauseous and dehydrated that I never really had a chance at getting even a few hours of sound and restful sleep. Instead, I just kept rolling around, trying to find the magic position that would ease the throbbing in my overheated head and body. I barely slept that night. On Wednesday I tried to recuperate some energy and hydration by drinking as much water and electrolyte sports drinks as I could stomach. Having cut way back on my sugar intake during the past few years, I needed to seek out something other than Gatorade or any of its overly sweet sports drink lookalikes. I’ve learned quite a bit recently about how to take care of my physical health, and that makes last week’s unhealthy decisions even more upsetting. I should not have gone in on Wednesday night, but again, I did.
“Angry Eyes” from the Hope Mill collection
When I arrived at work on Wednesday, I was well prepared with lots of water and energy drinks, pain medications, and the types of food that my intuition told me I could handle without feeling nauseous. But the one thing that really made a difference was that my outlook and attitude had changed between the moment I fell into bed the previous night and 3:30 PM the following day. Somewhere during those hours, I saw through the conditioned insanity of my wage worker mindset. I had been trying to prove myself to the company and all of my new coworkers, and I’d even been trying to prove to myself that I still possessed the physical prowess I once had, and meanwhile I had somehow forgotten to take care of the physical body that I had been using like a machine to try to prove myself. I am so grateful to be able to recognize the madness in some of my behaviors these days. It took me many years to see with any kind of clarity, the dysfunctional and self-defeating qualities of my own actions and intentions. For me, it has always been extremely helpful to write through the issues I’m up against, so once they are laid out before me, I can pour over them, looking for the moment where my thoughts began to lead me astray. I have almost entirely recovered as I’m writing this today. I’m still feeling some lingering adverse effects from the partially self-inflicted illness which came on a week ago. It looks as though I’ll be continuing on down the winding pathway in this wonderful journey, we call life!
“The Path” 2011 by Scott Joseph Moore
To finish off this exploration into the irrationalities of my own self-defeating behaviors, I would like to make an attempt to move to a higher level of self-care. I’ll do this by touching on the other situation that happened toward the end of last week (the one involving family). Here’s the gist of it. A member of my family, someone that I’ve grown to love and respect, made a series of unhealthy choices and ended up in the hospital. It was a motor vehicle accident. As you would expect, there were attempts at denial and the shifting of blame by this family member, even from the hospital bed, but it was obvious to everyone around this person, that the bulk of the responsibility for what happened was on their shoulders alone. How does this relate to my story about suffering from heat exhaustion? Because we both knew in our hearts that we were making these unhealthy choices, and yet we made them anyway. We can offer ourselves as much self-worth as we want. We can tell ourselves that we are as worthy as anyone else. We can even fool ourselves into believing that we are more worthy than others. But at the end of each moment, we can only accept the amount of self-worth that we’re feeling we deserve.
