Dear All, Thought I’d put record of meeting last week on blog. Don’t die of boredom! Had the first production meeting yesterday with all members of the team so far: Humphry, Jack, Leonie, Don (and Assistant) Luke, Lucy, Ed and Louise. Went really well. Diarised and got date for final storyboard. Next week discussions with design team separately. Jack showed his montage, which was very well received. There was some discussion about the “Cartoon style” with the slow dissolves, which Leonie liked because it showed transitions, and also the Blue style. I thought it was all good, but the issue of how the Gods control it was important, and this affects whether to use the slow dissolves or not. Also thought about music and interactivity. Don’s assistant Franscisco? was very enthusiastic about the interactivity and wants to get involved in that aspect, especially with the soundtrack. Showed: Orphee, Clash of the Titans, Le Mepris, Beau Travail but not the pictures of Merthyr Mawr and Craig y nos, which could have been a mistake. Also the minidv that Luke Lucy and I shot and that Luke and Lucy did post-production on. Really good feedback. What emerged was what was unconscious in my mind. Don noted that I liked a lot of statues, and non moving things, which I had not noticed. Also that I had a spare sense of design – esp. in Beau Travail. Leonie noticed that our previous discussions had all been about pre-raphaelite references and was surprised, and understood why I had liked Merthyr Mawr. Humphry also liked Merthyr Mawr for the sense of sky and of different horizons, and I like it because it seems to show a whole fictional world. However, he also wanted the best of both worlds – so do I – with some sense of lushness within the sparse landscape of the desert and some pre-raphaelite feeling. Emerging from Leonie, Don and Ed was a feeling that I had to “make up my mind” about the visual style. However, Humphry intimated that this is perhaps a modernist tendency to unify everything and I also felt it was a bit of a bi-product of showing clips (a kind of mood board) where some connotations were those I intended and some were not, but the team did not have enough knowledge of the script to judge. It is also that we have very different designers, and different screens showing different things, so we do need me to have an overall sense of how everything will fit together. Don wanted us to make everything modern day, including costumes, to give a timeless feel. Having slept on it, today I realised that this is really a bit of a scripting problem. I am now sure that all the characters should be in a kind of ancient greek costume, albeit an abstracted and timeless one. This will unify all the screens and all the worlds. The Gods live outside time and this should be reflected in their living space. They need to operate the TV’s/computers, so perhaps their space should have a bit of everything in order to show them outside time. This is also where the Kitsch goes on and where the reference to Clash of the Titans happens. In Clash of the Titans, they have dolls/midgets which they operate as puppets – is this any use? It is a different world to that of the nymphs. I also wonder whether we need something in the script a little like the opening sequence of Casablanca with the map. A map of Merthyr Mawr with where everyone lives, which turns into a panoramic shot looking down on Merthyr Mawr. This might unify the style a bit. How are the nymphs going to unify with the warfare stuff?. Is this why Don is so keen on modern dress? This is perhaps the hysteria which needs solving at the moment. It is a fault of the script, it has no absolute solution, and therefore the playing out of variations will determine the way the film is going to be read. Which way will it go: allegory with Greek elements, or modern drama. The hysteria says that the allegory will risk losing coherence and people won’t understand the modern references next to the old, and the modern drama misses the flavour and extra interest of the ancient greek. Need the discourse of the master here. Sorry for the waffle, but I’m just starting it off. CheersCoral