I recently stumbled upon a blog called ‘One Week / One Band‘. The premise of the blog is that a writer takes over the blog for a week and focuses the week upon dissecting the work of one artist or band. While I read various weeks worth of musicians work scrupulously unpacked, I was completely taken aback by the incredibly nuanced writings of Sophie as she looked at the artist Lorde and her album ‘Pure Heroine’ specifically.
Whilst Sophie really beautifully articulated thoughts on the themes rampant in the album which I too share a great love of, I thought to myself “how on earth would you possibly go about representing these emotions on screen”, deeply internalised emotions like angst, boredom, juxtaposing feelings of fear and excitement for the future and most of all loneliness mixed with this idea of belonging to a collective whether you want to or not. This is essentially a tale of a teenager in the suburbs.
After my initial thoughts of being completely perplexed as to how I would possible film these types of things, I now feel really inspired to tackle this task as it perfectly aligns with what I stated previously that “I want to figure out a way to present internalised struggles that can’t necessarily be acted in an obvious way.” I feel that the album ‘Pure Heroine’ also works perfectly for this task as it doesn’t tell stories of exact experiences but more assembles a collage of an assortment of emotions to create a tonal piece. This will definitely help me avoid recreating stories represented in the lyrics (as there are none) but will lead me to consider how I will use cinematography to imbue these scenes with the previously mentioned facets of humanity much like how the aural elements of the production of the album does.
To put it clearly, what I will be doing is adapting certain features of the Lorde album ‘Pure Heroine’ as well as blogger Sophie’s reading of it into a collection of scenes over the coming weeks.