big picture and cold read

This is a Story About Wintonbury

City:  Wintonbury, MA (based off of Edgartown, MA)
Street: Bakers Street

• One story with various households on Baker Street.
• How do I connect the stories?
• The study is where Annabel Olive writes. She’s the author, narrator, character who knows everyone in some way?

Themes:

1. Family. Each house on Bakers Street has family problems, whether it’s a loss, a responsibility
2. Love. Of family, significant other, divorce
3. Loss (of life, innocence, love) and struggle, hitting bottom.
4. Alienation/loneliness
5. Dealing with reality (through avoidance or facing it)

Tone:

Trying to sustain an illusion of normalcy, deciding what to do with your life. Everyone is going through something that’s not great. Melancholic, distressing, colloquial in familiarity?, resigned.

Why am I telling you this story?

“...Hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human…”

For short stories: how disparate people in a town try to connect

Sincerity of being human, trying to be a good person

“...Since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

A greater sense of meaning and optimism

The story needs to come together..

Sometimes life is difficult, and I think that we can turn to stories in the form of books, tv, movies, etc. in order to not feel alone in all of it. I’m not writing happy stories, because I don’t need a happy story to relate to to feel like I’m going to be okay. I want to feel like I’m not alone, and I want my audience to feel like that, too. That’s why all of these characters are going through their own struggles; although all different, they’re all going through something. And they’re all on the same street. Plus there’s a bit of sentimentality and humor in all of it. Those two characteristics make a story or time more genuine I think, and more easy to approach.

Observing people and learning why we do the things we do can help build depth to the

characters.

Why am I doing this?

I’m a wallflower, I love writing, and I love art. Naturally, I want to depict stories about humans.

Cold read/ Feedback:

World building stage sets, quiet space, domestic, constructed, brighter feel, colors more saturated and true, flat, gestural brushwork, light quality open aired, I’ve never felt like I was a character, but I feel a connection with the character, an empathy with this person because, I do like the framing device come out but not so fly at me, but I can lean into the space. Subtle way of doing things like the sitting in the middle of the couch, boxes stacked together. Human elements, evidence of a human being, wear and tear that gives a feeling of this person.

I talk about the characters as though they exist. Making them believable. Making the feeling of a real world. Flatness draws you in. muted colors in it. Maintaining the artificial aspect with the border. What could make it interesting is something that is so obviously constructed with fiction. Magical realism to build a convincing world and then artifiical things happen. Intrigues more with beyond the border. Set a rule and intentionally broke it. Exiting the image. Objects end, more intentionally placed instead of a snapshot.

Trompe loi in the set too. Least narrative thing to do the most narrative thing like the chocolates, that is exciting. Wait, these people aren’t real? Trompe Loi words. The weirdly specific. It takes a whole world for stuff that weird to make out. Tarintino showing a world.

Be thinking about pushing the believable fiction into the spectrum. Tension between artificiality and life-likenss through handling of paint or weird specificity or weird value range. Awkward line very planned and calculated. Airless quality like the trees don’t blow in the wind. Like you could turn the corner and see behind the scenes.

Double sided tape, found object to hang, sticker, tack. Formally, torn out of a book -walter. Sets the terms better for how to read this. Work of fiction. Suspension of disbelief put yourself in this book. Rip it out of the book? Margins in book. Pages in book. Full page spill something on it. I love the pages, i like the idea of tearing because of found artifact. Personally, fighting  a losing battle, I go look at art first but others… found frames? T-pin. I see them as little works of art. Not like a normal tag they are with a heavy hand. Also i like the paintings as the illustrations, so maybe not the car, maybe not the color. Creating such a detailed textured that it feels like time travel. What if I tore out actual pages.