Paul Wiley's MFA Thesis Proposal

To the Thesis Committee at the School of Visual Arts

Graduate Computer Arts Department

New York City

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INTRODUCTION

The easier road to take is simply to do what I do, and not to question the "why" of it all. Pursuing the completion of a significant body of work, a thesis, inspires and requires me to delve further. It is with that in mind that I have endeavored to discover the source of my desire to create alternative environments.

My childhood was largely spent concocting stories and constructing places where I would have preferred to have been. Although my family was loving and nurturing – as much as I presume any other average family to be – there was only scant support for the way I wanted to spend my time: drawing, writing, or composing music.

The "where" of this thesis film will be derived from the imagination and visual research. The "what" will be a personal voyage that features these places in a cohesive succession. The "why" will guide the narrative, and by extension, will pilot the audience through a visual and aural experience, a journey through time, place, and imagination.

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“A man might disappear into the stark, unmediated horrors of his own consciousness
without ever leaving the house in which he was born...”
– E.L. Doctorow
from the Foreward to Franz Kafka's Amerika

The above quote illuminates the backdrop of my thesis film. Using Kafka's approach to work as a model, the film explores what a creative child does to emotionally escape his repressed microcosm. But there is a difference: for Kafka, as Doctorow points out, it was about horror. For me, it is about joy. Nodding to broadly accepted notions of Kafka's association with insects [Metamorphosis], the narrator is an elderly dragonfly who recalls his childhood in a cultureless agricultural village.

THE FILM

The film begins with the narrator recalling his childhood days in such a place, and explaining what he did to find solace. Drawing pictures of his fantasy environments in his makeshift attic studio, the camera trucks in to the image on his drawing board, and the scene comes to life. The viewer is pulled into his world, and one scene dissolves into the next through such vehicles as staircases, flat images that become dimensional, futuristic escalators, tunnels and chutes.

As the voiceover of the narrator fades to release the viewer into his world, the voice of a mezzo-soprano rises, singing an aria about escaping while being still. This libretto is being written in an imaginary language. In keeping with Kafka's approach to foreignness, it is important that the viewer feel the strangeness of not knowing where s/he is going or hearing. The language utilizes translation software in an unusual fashion, but the final libretto is “trans-syllabolized” into a new language, with a set of rules for pronunciation and syntax. [Please click here to see the libretto.]

Created using Alias's Maya and hand drawings, and composited in AfterEffects, this five- to seven-minute film will carry the audience through a series of about eight sets: beginning in the dreary grey-sepia village, and ending in the same place, ultimately in full bloom and intense color. The use of grey-to-color symbolizes the narrator's epiphany concerning the value of repressed childhood, without which he would have found no need to escape, and no skill to create the beauty to which he had devoted his life.

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RESEARCH: A PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHILDHOOD CREATIVITY: THE ROOTS

Amabile, Teresa M. The Social Psychology of Creativity.
Rosen, Marjorie D.. Childhood Revealed: Art Expressing Pain
Miller, Alice.. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

These books lay, in part, the foundation for further reading on nurturing children who exhibit talent at a young age, and as exemplified below, for those who develop into creative adults.

KAFKA SELECTIONS: BY AND ABOUT

Franz Kafka: the Diaries
Franz Kafka, Amerika
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka, The Trial

These few selections will be used not only to examine Kafka’s work and to develop a sense of his isolation, but also as scenic inspiration.

Ernst Pawel , Nightmare of Reason: Life of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Blue Octavo Notebooks
Steve Coots, Kafka: A Guide

The above three books will interpret Kafka’s work and provide insight into his process of creating the idea of a place through his imagination and travelogues.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

This work provides significant contrast to the ones directly listed above; disputing his image as one of self-loathing, negative, and repressed.

IDEAS IN ISOLATION, HOPE AND VISION

Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
Helen Keller: the Story of My Life
To Love This Life: Quotations from Helen Keller

The Phillip Ward Interviews

Phillip Ward is an artist, curator, author and poet of humble beginnings. Raised in the ultra-Christian hills of Appalachian Kentucky, Mr. Ward had to contend with finding a place for his creative genius in a two-room home brimming with siblings, incest, the Bible and poverty. The interviews I conduct will examine his work as an adult and his methods of escapism to find solace in his own creative forays as a child.

BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN [short list]:

Nonie Niesawand, Lighting
Vincent LoBrutto, The Filmmaker’s Guide to Production Design
Peter Gössel, Gabriele Läutheuser , Architecture in the Twentieth Century
Joseph F. Corn, Brian Horrigan , Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Past Visions of the American Future
Rockport Publishing , The Hospitality and Leisure Architecture of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo

FILMS [short list]

The Wizard of Oz
Antz
The Trial
Pleasantville
Naked Lunch
Kafka
Toys
Fifth Element
Blade Runner
Hudsucker Proxy

This image may aid in better understanding of how the above references will support the final film.

RESEARCH: PSYCHOLOGICAL

The initial basis of this film is tangential to the study of creative children in oppressed households and institutions. Though the film itself travels far beyond what this may imply, it serves as a springboard to a pool of writers whose work exemplifies the desire to escape the environments in which they find themselves.

Technology –specifically the ability to create alternative environments– enables this kind of child to express his/her desire to be somewhere else. This “somewhere else” generally grows from a fertile imagination, but is guided by social and familial constructs, personal experiences, and what the software and hardware can provide.

RESEARCH: CONCEPTUAL

Inspiration will be drawn from a plethoræ of seemingly disparate sources: from books on the lives of real people, to films that center around fantastic ideas, to personal interviews of living artists. The thesis describes a union of creative people who feel isolated, contemporary technology, and personal response to environment and architecture.

Readings will largely focus on the work of Franz Kafka, both his personal writings as well as biographical sketches. There are two primary reasons for considering Kafka a suitable nucleus for the thesis film: his life and work aptly describe that of the isolated creative; and the spirit of his writing embodies the surrealistic and otherworldly quality that I believe will reflect the history of my personal work, and the film I’m in the process of making. In addition to Kafka, readings will include the Diary of Anne Frank and works by blind and deaf author/poetess Helen Keller.

Anne Frank is a prime example of creativity in an oppressed environment. Her will to create and her development of a cohesive statement at an early age parallels –albeit in rather bleak and extreme circumstances– that of many creative children in trying situations.

Helen Keller’s writing is an excellent example of synæsthetic interpretation. Because of her inability to hear and see, her perception of the world was based exclusively on her tactile and olfactory senses. This should provide keen insight to developing creative work through the narrow channels of her remaining senses.

RESEARCH: THE ÆSTHETIC

This film begins with recollection, morphs into child-like imagination, and ends with the epiphany of presence. There is a quality of light that emerges from memory. It is less saturated, dim, sepia. And there is a definite flight of fancy that my work has evoked these past fifteen years: it is generally hopeful and often surreal.

With that in mind, my æsthetic research will be founded on the study of architecture, natural environments, production design, and utilize some of the work of Kafka mentioned above. Film will play an important role in discovering new ways to solve creative problems, especially those that deal with hopeful colors, or by contrast, the darkness of personal fears and gloomy situations.

RESEARCH: ÆSTHETIC: the Dragonfly and the Architecture of his Hamlet

The story is about a creative young dragonfly's desire to escape his dismal home-life. The use of the insect-as-character creates interesting challenges for the sense of scale and methods of village construction. For example, using catonine tails rather than the trees one might expect behind a house, as well as tall grasses provides an innate sense for where this story may be taking place. Initial research on insect architecture revealed that their homes are generally mound-like, or in the case of flying insects who construct, more like a bee-hive.

However, in an effort to maintain a sense of compassion for the main character, the audience would need to identify with something familiar; consequently, research segued into exploring shanty towns, and eastern European and Chinese rural hamlets. Emphasis is placed on avoiding parallel and perpendicular lines, to keep the general æsthetic organic. Using pebbles, pieces of wood and grass stalks for the material of the structure makes a connection with insect architecture. The overall gestalt of the building uses lines from the cultural references mentioned above: flowing rooflines, ground-touching eaves, and rounded window- and door-frames.

:AND BEYOND

As I continue to develop more environments as described above, sketches will evolve as a natural part of the ideation process. Research for these “places” will depend on their themes: some will be spiritually dark or soberly realistic, and others will be tranquil and occasionally playful, or speak to an optimistic future. It could be noted that this light against dark serves to illuminate the contrast between the dark history of the main character and the hope he finds in retreating within his own thoughts.

Sources will include books and images from the NYPublic Library Picture Collection, the Fashion Institute of Technology Library, the SVA Library and online searches.What follows is an inconclusive list of environments and loose chronology:

• Opening scene: camera leaving the very edge of a small town, where the buildings begin to diminish in size and eventually the greens and browns and yellows are all we see. Flyover from the edge of this town, over corn fields, trees, more fields, then cross-fade into:

• Hamlet described above [see “…Architecture of His Hamlet”]

• We enter his room by way of home movie on screen [see storyboard]

• His bedroom feels womb-like. One can tell he is comfortable here, and has made it his sanctuary. Everything is rounded and wooden [or ‘leafed’]. He has a few creature comforts: a victrola, some cushy pillows, a make-shift celery-stalk based drawing table with paper and pencils, and illuminated by a bare bulb that was formerly the tail of a firefly. Despite its appearance of warmth and ease, there is a note of gloom and despair in this room. This may be achieved by the use of proper lighting, desaturated colors as well as through camera angles and composition.

• The first scene that takes place (in his head/on the drawing table) is a spiral staircase from a medieval castle keep. Darkish browns and greys, with occasional shafts of light from outside, opens up onto:

• The Glorious Garden of Bubble Machines: the music changes to mirror the abundance of color which was heretofore quite absent: rolling green hills around infinite slabs of glistening white marble. These are the foundations for bubble machines. Bright plasticky bubbles pop out of the wonka-esque orifices in the ground, and float to the skies.

• The Wheel Room: a neo-Victorian/post-post-Apocalyptic industrial space that has a series of churning gears and wheels jutting out of the metal-plate flooring.

• The Eatery: Is it 1955? Or is it what they thought 2055 would have looked like, a hundred years before? Surfaces are smooth and reflective, but there is a warm patina of wear over the Bakelite and chrome.

• The Opera Set: made of amber and oxidized copper, these angular horns jut out from stony hills. Think: Sydney Opera House meets the Flintstones. They are translucent, and lit from within by warm yellowish flame. There will be about forty of these at varying heights and shades of yellow-gold hue.

• The Garden of Heroes is based on the crisp edges and grandeur of English formal gardens in the 18th Century. The camera will employ a Kubrick-like symmetry as it trucks through statues of dragonflies [in granite] on either side and approaches the Grand Hero at the head of the reflecting pool.

• The Hall of Stairs: M.C.Escher gets a boost as moving tinted light sources create curious shadows on his classic “Vaulted Staircase”. Intense color will be used, and camera angles and direction will re-enforce the sense of confusion concerning place and orientation.

• Hell’s Bathroom: a descent down to the sewage Styx, it gets dark enough not to worry about what you may run into. Surrounded on four sides of a repeating bathroom –rusted, dry, in disrepair– the camera falls into a pit of black, and opens (possibly) up onto:

• The Transport Station: Fast, efficient, vast, and colorful, with walls of windows that look out onto a city of the future. Flythrough of this city, which will borrow from a multitude of architectural sources, including: Aztec, Belle-Geddes, Art Moderne, George Lucasian, Edwardian Skyscrapers, Futurama, and many other influences.

• The city recedes into smaller buildings, and we come to realize we are where we began, and then flying over the fields, to the narrator’s hamlet, everything in full color… the epiphany.

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