All Together Now — Speed Post: 3 of 12

The project notes all crudely sorted in second hand binders. It’s not posh but it’s more functional for now.

 

For all the decades I’ve had this project, I’d jot down thoughts and ideas for it on little scraps of paper and throw them in a box. After a while, a box of tiny notes become useless no matter how profound, exciting, and necessary they may be because they can’t be retrieved and applied from a chaotic pile. New images would be printed and collected the same way until the tasks they were supposed to act as reference for were undertaken without them. Periodically, I’d devote time and effort all along to sort and organize it all but it was like putting grains of sand on the beach in color and size order as the tide rushes in.

But. It. Is. All. Done. Now.

Thousands of ideas and images sorted over hundreds of hours through many years were tackled with my Floor Flowers, where I’d take a stack, and sitting on the floor, would sort them into their categories of scene, character, and production. Above, is one of the last stubborn piles to get through. And every bit is now in a place I can get to it easily concerning any aspect of the film. Everything is now in its own subject binder, category pocket in a subject binder, glued down on poster boards, or on cards in panorama binders. There’s no more images to sort finally and not a single good idea I’ve ever had for it has been lost.

Going through it all, I found a small percentage of ideas were no longer fitting for me as I’ve changed and grown over the last 32 years. Those were scrunched up and thrown away. But what the sorting showed me more than anything was how many of those notes I kept, if not captured, would have really been a loss in the film to have missed them, things I’d long forgotten. Substantive things that I can’t imagine the film without. I was gasping over some of them, jaw dropped, in wonderment how major keys were written down years ago and tossed in a box. I should secure them by making paper copies of the important ones or key them in to store copies in the cloud.

I can’t recall if I mentioned in the blog yet how I finally got all the big reference posters finished for every aspect of the film during lockdown and hung them all on an unused rolling clothes rack. They’re arranged from beginning to end, left to right, so paging through them all is like seeing the film. All the images used to be up on the acres of walls at the former loft, but here that wasn’t possible so everything had to be cut down into multiple posters and labeled. Plus, adding the additional 10 years of new images collected since then had to be added to them as well. All done now.

After that, the posters ran out of space so I started adding new images and notes to cards in loose leaf binders as annex to the rolling rack. These are all current and caught up now too. I use tubs of wallpaper gel for all the pasting down, by the way. It’s inexpensive and lays flat, non toxic, long lasting, zero waste.

I have caught up on sorting in the past previously, but why this time clearing the decks seems different is because any new ideas I have now get directly applied. So much has now been completed in terms of sets and puppets, nearly everything. When I get an 1/2L idea now I put it right where it goes, no more backlogging. There’s less to write down and collect too as the story has now been satisfactorily conceptually realized.

Filming, editing, adding sound is what’s up next, so it’s good to have clarity about what it should look and sound like.