colleenkwok
Oct 16, 2010
Graduate / MY CREATIVE PROPOSAL FOR FILM MFA [2]
HELLO Hope someone would like to kill sometime to read this and throw some feedback!
I believe that there is one defined period, a period of time more specific than an era such as the culturally broadcasted 60s or the 80s, in every lifetime that stands out in particular. To me, the things that happened in the year 2000-the Belgium/Netherlands Euro cup, the Sydney Olympics, or the Y2K bug and many other things-are collected in my brain and make me believe that I know the year 2000 better than everyone else. I want to make a film whose only subject matter is the year 2000.
In 2000, people embraced the new century with many new concepts and lots of 90s icons disappeared of a sudden. It was a farewell to the 20th century, yet some of its characteristics still remained such as the use of cassette tapes. 2000 was the gap between the nostalgic 90s and the 21st century. It was like a grey zone that did not belong to either decade but possessed its own uniqueness. However, that is the year when SMS texting and ICQ chatting grew, when DVD actually replaced VHS and VCD, and when the fresh concept of reality shows arrived and that won the favor of a generation audience.
My fascination of revealing what more had happened in 2000 is turned on by the devotion to nostalgia. To recall myself, I started middle school of that time. I was thirteen, perhaps the age that one's brain is most unsettled, eager to perceive and imagine, and can storage the largest quantity of data that transformed into future memory. Eventually, I come up with a question to ask myself why the 23 year-old me today is so interested in recalling this period and even want to reproduce it by the magic of cinema. More significantly, to look into why does human have the pure affection of being nostalgia towards the past world.
I then have this idea of a film-within-a-film work. The inner film is the one that as above intended to mention: a film that fully portrays the year of 2000 and embodies its significance (<2000>). The undergraduate education of non-linear experimental filmmaking leads me to exclude narrative elements and traces but to base on rhythm, shape, image and sound. <2000> will be portraiture of series of events following a protagonist. The events occur in the film without following a timeline. The protagonist's archetype would be myself of the time, a freshman in middle school. She drives a tractor that allows her to travel along the landscapes of "2000 happenings". The space and scale of both the tractor and the landscapes are as flexible as an animation. To describe a sequence as an example, the tractor navigates on a spring of boiled water that is being poured out from an instant bowl of Roman Noodles, and protagonist driving the tractor sees the tilted angle of her pals having a Roman Noodles dinner. The tractor succeeds in passing the river and goes on the ground of a busy street and the landscape of an urban 2000 is seen. Parallel to the tractor the side view shows the scenery of people riding scooters with their Sony Discmans with a headphone and a remote control attached on their shoulder bags. The collected events are scripted and chaptered in 12 months, but they do not mean to be presented in a chronological order. The journey of the tractor may not go from the chapter May to June, but perhaps from the celebration of millennium to the summer specials from Pizza Hut. The main production duty would be a massive work of staging and design in for reconstructing the past world and atmosphere. Again, the subject matter is the year 2000, the strategy is to partially borrow a perspective of the 13yr old girl/tractor duo, and the essential theme is to embody the significance and uniqueness of this year.
The above thought and production from me will be documented by a separate documentary production as an outer film. This production crew is going to practice their job of both documenting the crew <2000> and to question it as a devil advocate. On one hand, it massively captures the most detailed aspects of the film production. It observes the origin of the enthusiasm, and the video footage from this documentary crew may be able to answer the question why nostalgia is important. It will also witness the predictable obstacles from the film production, such as the difficulty of advancing the story without a structural plot, or the depression from the filmmaker myself to admit that the more real the cinema creates, the more I realize it is something gone. Thus on the other hand, the documentary camera questions the filmmaker: what is the true significance behind all these nostalgia...What does it express when the narrative is non-structural...is all of this, just a one-person stratagem to use the excuse of graduate school to playfully make the 2000 presented as real to be gratified or does it really mean something? This <The Making of 2000> is a solid idea following an uncertain idea. Therefore, the ending of this documentary is opened--<2000> is not only finished during my two year of graduate in UCLA, but it also fulfill the proposal of recapturing the unique year. Or vice versa, it is cut in the third quarter of the production and it ends up in a gallery as an installation of series of film segment projections. It would be opened since I don't need to seek the answer in present.
The difference between a documentary and a mockumentary is that documentary does not manipulate the fact presented, and the treatment of the outside-frame production would follow this rule as a documentary since I understand my own devotion towards this subject is a real fact and all the actions it will captured: the pre and post- production, the interview, the informative footage, will be real. This documentary, temporarily given an ironic name of <the Making of 2000>, is my proposal treatment.
HELLO Hope someone would like to kill sometime to read this and throw some feedback!
I believe that there is one defined period, a period of time more specific than an era such as the culturally broadcasted 60s or the 80s, in every lifetime that stands out in particular. To me, the things that happened in the year 2000-the Belgium/Netherlands Euro cup, the Sydney Olympics, or the Y2K bug and many other things-are collected in my brain and make me believe that I know the year 2000 better than everyone else. I want to make a film whose only subject matter is the year 2000.
In 2000, people embraced the new century with many new concepts and lots of 90s icons disappeared of a sudden. It was a farewell to the 20th century, yet some of its characteristics still remained such as the use of cassette tapes. 2000 was the gap between the nostalgic 90s and the 21st century. It was like a grey zone that did not belong to either decade but possessed its own uniqueness. However, that is the year when SMS texting and ICQ chatting grew, when DVD actually replaced VHS and VCD, and when the fresh concept of reality shows arrived and that won the favor of a generation audience.
My fascination of revealing what more had happened in 2000 is turned on by the devotion to nostalgia. To recall myself, I started middle school of that time. I was thirteen, perhaps the age that one's brain is most unsettled, eager to perceive and imagine, and can storage the largest quantity of data that transformed into future memory. Eventually, I come up with a question to ask myself why the 23 year-old me today is so interested in recalling this period and even want to reproduce it by the magic of cinema. More significantly, to look into why does human have the pure affection of being nostalgia towards the past world.
I then have this idea of a film-within-a-film work. The inner film is the one that as above intended to mention: a film that fully portrays the year of 2000 and embodies its significance (<2000>). The undergraduate education of non-linear experimental filmmaking leads me to exclude narrative elements and traces but to base on rhythm, shape, image and sound. <2000> will be portraiture of series of events following a protagonist. The events occur in the film without following a timeline. The protagonist's archetype would be myself of the time, a freshman in middle school. She drives a tractor that allows her to travel along the landscapes of "2000 happenings". The space and scale of both the tractor and the landscapes are as flexible as an animation. To describe a sequence as an example, the tractor navigates on a spring of boiled water that is being poured out from an instant bowl of Roman Noodles, and protagonist driving the tractor sees the tilted angle of her pals having a Roman Noodles dinner. The tractor succeeds in passing the river and goes on the ground of a busy street and the landscape of an urban 2000 is seen. Parallel to the tractor the side view shows the scenery of people riding scooters with their Sony Discmans with a headphone and a remote control attached on their shoulder bags. The collected events are scripted and chaptered in 12 months, but they do not mean to be presented in a chronological order. The journey of the tractor may not go from the chapter May to June, but perhaps from the celebration of millennium to the summer specials from Pizza Hut. The main production duty would be a massive work of staging and design in for reconstructing the past world and atmosphere. Again, the subject matter is the year 2000, the strategy is to partially borrow a perspective of the 13yr old girl/tractor duo, and the essential theme is to embody the significance and uniqueness of this year.
The above thought and production from me will be documented by a separate documentary production as an outer film. This production crew is going to practice their job of both documenting the crew <2000> and to question it as a devil advocate. On one hand, it massively captures the most detailed aspects of the film production. It observes the origin of the enthusiasm, and the video footage from this documentary crew may be able to answer the question why nostalgia is important. It will also witness the predictable obstacles from the film production, such as the difficulty of advancing the story without a structural plot, or the depression from the filmmaker myself to admit that the more real the cinema creates, the more I realize it is something gone. Thus on the other hand, the documentary camera questions the filmmaker: what is the true significance behind all these nostalgia...What does it express when the narrative is non-structural...is all of this, just a one-person stratagem to use the excuse of graduate school to playfully make the 2000 presented as real to be gratified or does it really mean something? This <The Making of 2000> is a solid idea following an uncertain idea. Therefore, the ending of this documentary is opened--<2000> is not only finished during my two year of graduate in UCLA, but it also fulfill the proposal of recapturing the unique year. Or vice versa, it is cut in the third quarter of the production and it ends up in a gallery as an installation of series of film segment projections. It would be opened since I don't need to seek the answer in present.
The difference between a documentary and a mockumentary is that documentary does not manipulate the fact presented, and the treatment of the outside-frame production would follow this rule as a documentary since I understand my own devotion towards this subject is a real fact and all the actions it will captured: the pre and post- production, the interview, the informative footage, will be real. This documentary, temporarily given an ironic name of <the Making of 2000>, is my proposal treatment.