Priduction meeting no.1 experimental film

Planning session no.1
So, yesterday evening, Charlotte, Stephen and I held our first planning meeting for this project. Beforehand each of us had done our own research and come up with a few different ideas. In addition to this we each brought our own ideas of what experimental film meant to us. As it is such a wide spectrum it was important to us that we made sure we were on ‘the same page’ so to speak.
We each showed a few examples that we had come across in the process if our research. This gave us all an idea of what the others had in mind when it came to experimental film. It also helped to give some context to the ideas. By doing this before we got into the real ‘nitty gritty’ of the planning process we gained a good bedrock for what we were talking about. We all knew what we were dealing with which made life a lot less difficult. One overriding thing e got from this discussion was that in our film we did want a strong idea of a structure. Some films we had seen had seemed to come under the banner of being a lot of random images placed together. In some cases this does work and work well but or us it is important to have not necessarily a narrative but some strong thematic structure.
When we had shared our examples we discussed them. Between the three of us we picked out what we did and did like about them and also began to discuss what we wanted our film to be about. Also how we are going to approach the idea of ‘experimental’. Obviously for us as with most if not all experimental filmmakers it involved working outside generally accepted filmic conventions.
As the brief stated we should base the film on either a word, an object or a poem , having read a short poem ‘how many miles to Babylon’ and always having had a fascination with sleep and the dream world it leads to I was keen to do some thing with this. When Stephen mentioned the idea of Lucid dreaming I was happy to interject my ideas at this point. From this we came up with several different idea that all revolved around the ideas of dreams and gaining control of them. For us this is an exiting route to go down, as within the grounds of experimental film there is a large scope to really explore the dream world without being tied down with such conventions of a narrative structure that makes complete sense. Dreams after all are usually lacking in this department.
So after a good few hours of a Skype call we have a strong idea to start from, we have decided to go off and individually come up with a few different ideas based on this.