Inspired by the Spooky Season

I’m working on something new. I rarely talk about works in progress, feels like inviting in a curse, but something about the spooky season inspired me to share this image and snippet from my new venture into horror…

🩸 EAT 🩸 
“What if you woke up to discover you had just eaten your neighbour?” 

EAT explores mortality, brutality, compulsion and addiction through a gripping narrative in an honest, even if a bit sarcastic, first person voice.

I hope you all enjoy this human generated image featuring my own human generated gob 👄 Bonus points to anyone who can guess what grocery items I used to make the FX blood 🤔 Click play to hear the snippet but proceed with caution and a strong stomach ⚠️

Time and Irony

I’ve been thinking about time. The inevitability of it. The invisibility of it. How much of it passes during which we feel as if we are in a state of In-between one thing and another, when in fact we are simply forgetting to acknowledge that every given moment is, in and of itself, a state of completion. This microfilm is part of a larger project I’ve been working on about these liminal states in which time passes by. I have yet to complete the full film as time has gotten away from me. Ironic isn’t it?

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What is a Literary Schrodinger's Cat?

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What inspired The Phoenix Effect

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Thoughts from a Shower Seminar

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I Think in Floorplan

I don't know if this is because I'm a visual thinker, or because I vividly remember watching my mom design what was probably the floorplan of the house that I grew up in and being so charmed by those little scale templates she used to add toilets and sofas to the drawing, but when I need to wrap my head around something, I think in flooorplan. This is my go-to method for everything from figuring out the obvious, like will that sofa fit in my apartment, to writing an ensemble of characters that are all engaged in action at the same time. Where is everybody and what are they doing at this crucial moment of the story? I know, I'll draw a plan and move their little pieces around until I figure it out.

I also spend a fair amount of time confabulating floorplans in my head - the ideal layout of my reasonably sized Italian villa, the cozy quarters I occupy during my space mission, the likely layout of my neighbour’s apartment based on the brief glimpse I caught through their door. Odds are, once I've been inside your house I'll remember its floorplan. Want to know if you you've got enough space to add that powder room? Just ask me.

Growing up, I also found myself mind-constructing the floorplans of my favourite sit-com sets. It didn't matter that studio sets utilize wall angles that no contractor would choose to build, have doors conveniently pop-up when they suddenly need to set a scene in the basement, and put closets where no closet belongs. I could still finish off that fourth wall and plunk that set in the building or on the street of its mythical origin. While this was clearly a precursor to my interest in production design, I recently realized that it was also a sign of my passion for storytelling.

A while back, after a rather spirit crushing professional disappointment during what felt like a few years of said disappointments, I was comfort watching Friday Night Dinner. The series, which sits high on my recommend list if you've never seen it, was filmed inside a real house. So naturally, I was obsessing over the locations of each door and window and laying out the rarely seen rooms upstairs in relation to the rooms below. While I was debating about the location of a potential second bathroom it suddenly hit me... I'm making this real!

By mind-constructing the environments of the stories that I love, I am creating a tangible reality in which me and those stories exist together. This is a house I can visit. These are people I can have dinner with. It doesn't matter how realistic these story worlds were, as soon as I started building them in my mind, from sit-com sets to fantasy castles, I was making them a reality. That is what drew me to design and ultimately into storytelling, an overwhelming instinct to construct a world of my choosing.

We all use books and movies as a means to escape into other worlds. I see the fact that me and my floorplany brain still choose to construct these words, as a testament to power of storytelling. As an adult, I can escape my woes in any number of ways. I can vent to a friend, sing-scream profanities in the shower, and pour myself a generous glass of wine, all of which I had already done. But what I really needed more than any of that, was spend Friday night at the Goodman residence. I needed to walk through the front door, smell what was cooking, take a seat on the lounge and wait for hijinks to commence.

I, like many storytellers, have occasion to question the “reason” for my work. In a world rife with more problems than I currently have the capacity to floorplan my head around, I often feel like I'm not doing enough. Maybe I'm entertaining, maybe I'm provoking thought, I might even been encouraging someone else to action... but is that enough? These moments in which I realize how much influence the stories I love still have over me, serve as reminders that a great story well told is powerful.

So, the next time you find yourself wondering about the “reason” for your story, write it for the anxiety ridden, caffeine addled, woman who is stuck in a sticky pool of self-doubt. Get her to put down her phone and start mindstructing your world. Ease the tension in her shoulders. Make her smile. That is enough.