WEEK 4
My two new storyboard animatics are viewable here:
This week I devoted to myself to researching and to expanding out my unnecessarily literal storyboard ideas. I've been feeling like I'm spinning my wheels a little bit, and so I decided to take my own advice (from my APD advice video I made in week 2) and start thinking laterally.
Context:
While looking for reference images more the Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York (where Sean's dad was imprisoned), I stumbled across the photograpy of Deana Lawson, a woman who's work 'Mohawk Correction Facility: Jazmin and Family 2012-2014' portrays a long row of family photographs taken of her sister Jazmin and Jazmin's incarcerated husband and their daughter.
In an aperture.org article on Lawson's work, Nichole Fleetwood describes:
"Taken together, prison portraits become a powerful archive representing the enduring struggles of black Americans to claim citizenship, kinship, love, and even hope in the face of multiple forms of racial injustice—poverty, profiling, failed economic policies, and mass incarceration. (...) Moreover, prison portraits, which are often sent between incarcerated and non-incarcerated loved ones, are important material objects to maintain connection and to communicate love in some of the most dire and punitive conditions, that is, the modern U.S. prison system."
Registering the existence of prison family photos definitely informed my decision to lean towards using photographs in my new storyboards.
These very traditional patriarch oriented photos (with the centered father and the surrounding wife and child) have also made me consider how I am framing Willis as a character. In his family portraits he is a father, but in his final moments, kept from his child but visited by his sister and mother, he is a son, not a patriarch. I don't see this as a negative or positive, I'm just more aware of it. I wonder how I can add intentional ideas along these lines of thought.
This research led me into looking at The Prison Renaissance Project, an organization created by and for incarcerated people for their artistic expression.
In an interview with Co-Founder Emile DeWeaver, he describes the struggle of creating an organization for economic/political/social empowerment, when organising, creating a business and distributing wealth is illegal in prison, a system which has a monopoly on all labour within it, artistic or otherwise and structurally can not allow for any empowerment. Prisons purpose is to have control over every avenue of empowerment, and I wonder how I can reflect that in my work.
My biggest inspiration came from the wording of the PRP's goals:
"To use art and community to create a culture if transformation to end cycles of incarceration"
"To create more proximity between the general public and incarcerated people" (Wonderfully words my exact reaction to seeing Deana Lawson's photography and how it connected me to incarcerated people through her art.).
"To connect incarcerated people to the communities that need them"
(not that they need, but that "need them". Prisoners are described as a useful resource, wanted by others and not the other way around)
These last two goals in particular I want to inform this project and shape my inquiry in future. This was a great week for research.
Rationale/Motivation:
Letting the idea of connecting incarcerated and non incarcerated people stew in my head, and Matt's advice that I should fall into being an animator, I set the goal to create new storyboards that describe things that aren't possible in live action.
Methods:
I made several mind maps, listening to the audio over and over and picturing different things, trying not to think vertically (along what I did before) but expanding out and writing down dozens of new ideas, good or bad.
I also wrote out each sentence and then wrote down how Sean's tone of voice in his reading of it made me feel. I made new ideas out of that and added them to the map.
I then made 2 new animatics and uploaded them.
This week I also got a sound engineer friend to clean up the audio and did a bunch of sketches of the sister character. I also watched a 1978 short documentary film called "Old People" and made notes and sketches based on the people in it for future reference.
Impact:
Its possible I can turn this work into something along the lines of the PRP's goals and actually have an impact on the American prison abolition discussion.
on Deana Lawsons portraits:
About This Work
By Holland Kerr
Email Holland Kerr
Published On: 19/08/2021