Recalibration

Sometimes, when you're writing or preparing for a project, you stumble on an image, or a piece of music, that pierces you in a way that is surprising, perfectly aligned and perfectly timed. It is, in practise and reality, what the punctum is in theory.

By way of a preface:
I've had to step away from the studio for a while to return to a draft of 'Galore' that requires urgent completion before giving over to the good folks who have committed to making this film with me. I am trying to find the stillness and calm you need to make sense of revisions and changes to a piece of writing that has been with you for a long time and has been polished within an inch of it's life. I've been executing some changes that are revitalising the script after some time away, but these changes all lead to unraveling threads that, somehow, have to be interwoven once again. And these things are not easily handled without a bit of quiet and time.

Now, the problem is that I'm nothing if not distracted at the moment. I'm still in the madness of post-film release where your brain skips from the technical and concrete (distribution, delivery, promotion) to the realms of probability and hope (audience, screenings, marketing). And another pretty damned exciting project I'm working on - 'The Turning' (a portmanteau adaptation of Tim Winton's novel of intertwined stories with a pretty wild group of filmmakers, actors and artists helming) - has received some development and scripting money which has got me itching to start tearing up the pages. And, to extend the whinge, I am also fucken tired. So, quiet and time is a little difficult to put in place.

But... deadlines and deliveries must be respected (if not tormented, abused and occasionally ignored) and given that no project is closer to my heart than 'Galore', I am sitting here, in stillness and quiet, by the window, writing 3 w.p.m. and inching closer to the perfect, untainted film in my head. And in this state of mind, wandering through the great tiny vices website, I stumble across three images that could not speak more to me about the heart of this film than all the pages I've written. Each of these three images, viewed within moments of each other, pierces me and seems to recalibrate, in inexplicable ways, what it is I'm trying to do with this crazy fucken project. So, thank you, perfectly timed gods of the procrastinating image trawl...

image: Dai Oinuma

Image: Brad Harris

image: Aaron Wojack