Ok we're already in October mode I see so let's pack this baby in.
Breanne:
Thank you so much for taking the time. I had considered the ending at the beginning and so when it came to the end, I was unable to lose it. More on that later.
Darren:
When I wrote: The Horseman, he was a completely blanketed individual that could have been played by one of the four allowed actors. When I wrote horseless horseman, it was to describe a blanketed “horseman” but without the horse. This shows the oddness of the world. For how could he be a horseman without a horse?
Regarding the noises that Geldez was making and my choice to use caps. I thought that important noises required caps. I did however consider writing them in dialogue however, I wasn’t sure because I imagined the first sound would come over a distance without Geldez in the picture at all, just the landscape of the area surrounding the camp. Then, we would see her cupping her hands and making the trill. It didn’t feel right to me being in dialogue, so that was the choice I had made at the time for better or worse.
Geldez’s words came from a true story I had learned while out on a Harvest Moon Walk at a nature sanctuary. Our guide told us that a particular kind of berry (which I can’t remember its regular name now) were called poverty berries by the natives because they weren’t so palatable. It was a joke among the natives to say to the white man that they needed to eat them to be healthy and protect them against whatever. I just made up the idea of them calling it Dam’s disease. Geldez relays the story when she’s half-corked and isn’t speaking clearly.
On spell checker: I don’t use spell checker at all. I check the old fashioned way.
Jeff:
I don’t do drugs like that. I have one coffee in the morning and after that it’s herbal tea of some kind. Before bed I’ll have a vodka or a scotch or a wine.
When I’m writing, I liked to work in silence.
The first image of the cage was to come from inside and thus from Telanu’s point of view.
Ryan,
I’m sorry you were unable to finish, but thank you for trying.
Michael,
Thank you. I worked very hard in my decisions of what to place on the page and how, but I wasn’t able to successfully create the sensations for people to understand.
Kevin
Criterion is not part of any larger work. I worked on it daily over the course of the week. The concept came to me as a way of exploring initiation rituals and strange beliefs that still exist in areas like for instance: Africa. Of course, we’re all familiar with real cases of demon possession and the idea that evil “travels” and searches for a home, a mortal frame in which to exist and so I saw this tribe existing in the now, with mixed cultures as we have now, together. And every year, it was necessary to perform this ritual, to find where the evil lurked and cage the unfortunate person.
In this case,
And I think I really screwed up in not showing this clearly:
Min had visited Telanu. None of the people except the sages were allowed on Cage Hill. It was forbidden and forbidden for a reason. But curiosity kills a cat. Min had visited Telanu and from thence on, part of that evil came to live within her. Her fate was thus sealed.
So her fear was warranted. She knew she had broken the rules and was crushed by guilt on top of fear.
So yes, I think the reason why the story didn’t work for people was because I failed to execute that knowledge in the appropriate way.
It’s such a great balancing act trying to give enough appropriate screen time where it is needed. And from that, I think that those who have said this is too big of a world for a short, I think they are right.
E.D.
Thank you for trying. As I’ve described above. It was probably too big a concept for a twelve page script.
Greg
Believe it or not, I tried to Greg.
Pia,
I know what you mean about budget. Depending upon who you know of course. I kind of did a mental “wave off” with a pretend conversation:
Dude
I don’t see this as low budget. Horses?
Sandra
What? We got horses. Bowden Rodeo
In July. Hey, buddy, can I borrow your
Horse? ‘He’ll be in a movie? My horse
In a movie?! Really?! Well sure?!’”
Dude
Ok, let’s say it’s that easy. What
About this mystical horseman angle?
Sandra
You never were a ghost on Halloween?
Sheets are the ticket.
Dude
A thirteen and fourteen year old?
Sandra
They can be older. They just need
To look younger.
Dude
Darren
Everyone is different and that’s good. I don’t play RPGs. I read different things all the time. Just finished a book entitled, “Anne Conway – The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosopy. It is unique because it was published posthumously and anonymously in 1690 many years after her death in 1679. Anne criticizes the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. She was apparently a master in the docrine of Lurianic Kabbalah and got “in” with the Quakers who she said were the only type of people she could handle being around, especially because of her illness. (Of course, she didn’t use the word, “handle”, but that gets the point across.
Anyways, I found it fascinating to read because I knew that what I was reading was originally written in a faint hand, before times of such modernity that has us using computers and cell phones etc. Not only was I transported to that world and time, I actually felt like I could feel her soul in the words she had written.
But is it for everyone? Probably not.
Hello CM,
I will try and do better next time. I worked very hard to try and make this work.
Cindy
As I mentioned above, I think there were some critical errors that I just didn’t see and the most important is that I did not show Telanu going to Cage Hill, Some evil entering into her and thus: She holds this as extreme guilt and fear because she knows inside herself that she will be the selectee. Really, the more I think about it, it becomes more and more clear that this story is too big for twelve pages. I had a lot of stuff that I was seeing and none of it landed on the page.
Phil,
I knew I was going to get heck for that one, but I really did think I had to make a choice and my choice came from this reasoning:
The character who plays her knows and will put into it what they see as being “matriarchal”. I wanted it specific enough, but open enough of a character cue to be interpreted as somewhat “commanding”, but also, by situations and dialogue with “the sheet”, also known as horseless horseman, that give her a warm and naturalness—not as some mystic mystic, but as a woman who runs off and has flings when she should be minding her work.
Heretic,
Yeah that exposition on page six. I kept thinking about the excellent expository speech that Vincent Cassel, playing Thomas Leroy, gives to his ballerinas. His great work and all that swooshy-swish with the cameras and I thought:
Oh what the heck: Just write the exposition. That’s what it is and we can work with it better perhaps if someone gets a ginormous brainwave.
It’s not a Chinese village, but a multi-cultural one designed to reflect the mixing of cultures across the globe that we see today more than ever.
Nachi and Meedath were made up, but I’m going to google them to see if there is something like that.
I do know what you mean about time spent on Geldez receiving the Criterion. My reasoning there was that I wanted to show that she’s not just some veiled mystic, but a gal who will:
1. Seduce “the sheet” to get out of bed to eat red berries and blossoms, obviously a weakness to the sheet.
2. Avoid her work by gallivanting to Lange Syne (a reference to the past)
3. Receive the Criterion that isn’t your typical old scroll, but a towel. Because… if you’ve got sheets, you might as well have towels, too.
So my desire was to establish that this was not to be specifically a dark piece. If I would have only had the caged Telanu, it would have been especially dark.
Part of the Horseman’s job was as a “time keeper” and to fulfill the idea that, “It’s very much the same ole – same ole, even if it is Ritual Day. He’s there, very much of a symbol of time, making his rounds very much as the postman does.
Regarding Min and Telanu:
I failed to establish a strong connection between the two of them, as I mentioned earlier in my discovery here. Really, I think I needed to show her “going against the rules”. When she’s at Cage Hill, (prior to the actual start of this story) and she’s going to as if like “getting a touch of the flu”, she gets a touch of the evil from within Telanu, represented as being very animal like, a kind of descent from the human level of speech and understanding. In other words, a very low degree.
There just wasn’t time for that and I failed because I didn’t clue into it until now.
The ending didn’t work for a lot of people. The purpose of the ending was this:
I needed to be clear that the reader/viewer was being requested to take a perceptual shift back—that even after troubles and great distress, life carries on. When they clear that table together, it is a representation of “clearing” which holds with the theme of redemption that I established at the beginning.
The red motif was used because it is indeed the color of Man. Adam , the Hebrew letters aleph, dalet, mem actually is the color red. There are many biblical associations with the color red and its variants such as scarlet and crimson. It has many positive qualities, but also negative ones such as lust and being even overly passionate. So that’s why I specifically put the verse from Isaiah 1:18 front and center at the top, and importantly, made the decision to use a child’s voice because it on surface sounds strange. Can a child possibly be the voice of reason? Speak of reasoning together? Don’t children just make demands and look at adults as just bodies to fulfill their needs? And then there’s the voice that we would expect to hear. Of a Wise Old Man, The Ancient of Days, but no. No, it’s a child.
Anyways, I hope that helps those who were frustrated by this. I worked really hard, but there it is and there she be..
Rdhay, Jordon and Andew
Thank you so very much for attempting this. LOL, you know what, Andrew? I had to google Terrence Malick. I’ll have to watch his work.
Hugh,
Thank you for the read. It was a serious attempt to work on visuals. The time aspect you mentioned needed some kind of clue. To me, it’s in the future, far enough to take us to the point where we’re working more directly with the forces that govern nature. Far enough that culture’s are all so mixed, (indeed they are quite intermixed now)but even more so. I imagine this to take place on an area of land, on our world that has been spared from any catastrophic event, once rocking the world. As such, the elders work hard at keeping malevolent evil forces “away” from their closely knit group.
Tzall I got for now. In the future I will entertain this story some more, but I have to keep moving on. It’s the way I work. Criterion will fulfill itself in all of its subtle forms when and if it desires. I’m going to appeal to my sensitivities and not superior logic. It will when it will. Takes nine months for a baby to be born. You can move the date up some, (nature does it sometimes – all my children were born early) but too far and it’s a risky deal. Same thing with writing: When something’s completely ready to be born in perfection, it will be so.
Toda Raba!!!
Sandra