We had our Work in Progress presentations today! (Or yesterday, or the day before, depending on when you’re reading this). It seemed like it went pretty well, I didn’t really get any negative feedback, which is always good.

So, for those of you who aren’t in my class, and have no idea who I am and don’t bother reading any of my blog posts, here’s just a quick summary of what I’m working on:

“I am working on a surrealistic black comedy screenplay that makes no effort to make any sense at all. The aim of this project is to experiment with finding ways of giving expression to things that usually wouldn’t have any. The reason I have taken a surrealistic approach to this is because of the free flow nature of the genre, there are so many directions to go in, and so many ways of playing around with different kinds of audiovisual cues.”

Much of my inspiration came from various memes, ranging from David Firth’s animated web series, Salad Fingers (2004), to the poorly made 3D model head from 4Chan, Meme Man, as well as from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Kubrick’s style in general.

For some reason, these examples are what my mind automatically goes to when I think of Surrealism, but one key piece of advice that has stuck with me from Smiljana’s feedback is that I should also look into classical tropes of the genre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking into these ‘boxed assemblages’, I have found a shitload of opportunity in regards to finding new directions to take the story in, as well as opportunities for references to classical surrealist art.

And, while I have found this new (or in this case, ‘old’) world of opportunity for direction of art, I still want to keep my main roots of inspiration but find a good balance between the two. I have the feeling that if I focused too heavily on the classical approach, the blend of surrealism and comedy would fail, and the script would fall too far into the serious side of the genre, leaving less room for interpretation.

Enough of the rambling, I’ll just finish this post off with a quick summary of what I talked about, because doing this even helps me to understand what the hell I was even saying.

So, TLDR, I’m writing a surrealistic black comedy script that is meant to be open to interpretation. Much of my inspiration came from more modern examples of surrealism, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and various internet memes, but the feedback from my Work in Progress presentation inspired me to look into some of the more classical examples of surrealistic art. Doing my research, I found that I would like to find some balance between classical influences and modern influences, so that the mood of the script isn’t too one-sided between grim and comedic, but has a balance of the two to leave as much room as possible for interpretation.