Thursday, April 14, 2011

Planning, scouting, casting, writing, rewriting, drawing...

I feel like I've made a lot of headway.  The things I thought I knew have changed...

I've gone back to the drawing board, started a new path, and then gone back again.  Really really big ideas can get smashed by the hammer of reality.  Time, money, people.  These are all my challenges.

I have learned that the best way to keep doing what I need to do is to adapt.

What if I don't have enough time or money to produce an epic photo book that spans hundreds of pages? Perhaps I should focus on creating one chapter at a time - one chapter every year in an epic intertwined story, each chapter dozens of pages of images. Maybe I'll never stop adding to it.  Life's work?  Maybe it's too soon to make those claims.  I am, after all, at the whim of other people - actors, stylists, set builders - all of them donating their time.

The giant story was an insane idea.  Not to say I can't do it.  But, I mean.... it's a pretty mad (mad in the ginsberg, gonzo kind of way) thing I'm trying to do.  So I decided: let's try this thing one step at a time - hence my decisions to focus on the 4th chapter: The Story of the Forest King.

The point is that there are struggles during the artistic process.  I'm in the thick of it now.  It's hard to wait. It's hard to see a production date weeks away... planning, scouting, casting, writing, rewriting, drawing even though I can't draw...  Within a few weeks I will be in the studio shooting this beast.  After that I will hole up in my wonderful underwater cave of an office (only coming out to have cappucino's or beers on the roof) and I will put these thing together.

Then.... ?

No comments: