Creating a vision document E. Jane Thompson
Industry Centre > Blogs > Creating a vision document | E. Jane Thompson
Posted by E. Jane Thompson
on Monday, October 20, 2008.
Categories: Film, Alumni
After a brief period of recovery following the Toronto International Film Festival where the Berliner Complex team all expended an enormous amount of energy – we’re back in action.
As writer, Katherine Collins has continued to work on the script, I have turned to creating a "vision" document.What's this? It’s a document that will begin to move the script off the page, a collection of images: photographs, painting references, renderings, maybe some storyboards. We will use this document to introduce our film to distributors, other potential investors, and actors – to seduce them, to give them a feel for the film we’re going to make. Eventually, I’ll also use it as ground zero for the film with key creatives and all the crew.
I began the process in terror – terror of the blank page, I suppose. It's not like I haven't been thinking about this – I've had the film on my mind for eighteen months. I've looked at lots of films for visual and tonal references. But how do I now bring all that viewing, all my imaginings, down to earth into a coherent statement?
I like to start with paintings.
Melinda, our main character, rents an apartment from which to spy on someone.
A figure gazing from a window was a frequent subject for the American painter, Edward Hopper. His characters are solitary women. He also painted views of windows from the outside looking in and from angles that were cinematic – high angles.
In my search, I stumbled for the first time onto Sun in an Empty Room. I like the emptiness it exudes, the feeling it gives off, and imagine Melinda at the window of her empty Berliner apartment.
Another painter I turned to is the American Eric Fischl.
His paintings are encounters with or contemplations of intimacy. Charged with sexual tension, their mystery draws me back over and over again.
But it was the reflection in the glass that caught my attention in Krefeld Project Sun Room Scene 1. We’ll have such opportunities in The Berliner Complex to work with reflections.
The Bed, the Chair, Head to Foot is so beautiful, with its rich dark areas, the light falling off into inky blackness, its suggestion of a story, of some kind of intimate transaction, a scene partly seen, partly revealed.
Last week, I met with production designer Marian Wihak. I worked with Marian on my short film, Letter from Francis. Our collaboration, which also included cinematographer Milan Podsedly, was gratifying and successful. Marian arrived at our meeting excited by our script (and with great questions about it), inspired by the visual possibilities it offered. She responded to “the embodiment of reflections in the story” as she put it. She brought with her photographic references, several collections by the Quebec photographer Serge Clément, whose work she’d first seen at Jane Corkin’s Gallery.
These are the first stirrings of our vision document.
E. Jane Thompson is a graduate of NSI Features First with her project The Berliner Complex.
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Views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).
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The views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).