FAS tells the story of Sebastian, a young gay physician, estranged from his rural Catholic Missouri family, who, having moved to Mali to heal the sick, is diagnosed with AIDS. Inspired by a quote from Meister Eckhart that we might “rejoice in the everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the soul and the fly are equal,” FAS will be created using Unity’s Cinemachine software with three networked cameras adopting the p.o.v of the eponymous characters. What each camera “hears and sees and how each moves depends in part upon the actions of the other cameras in real time. The cameras function as the “players,” both in the video game sense and in a theatrical sense. The cameras’ real-time “performance” is the material for the 2D film. Thus, in FAS, “liveness” resides in the “embodied” cameras as much as in the actors whose performance is pre-recorded with volumetric video. Thus, the film, itself, is a poetic documentation of both human and computer machinations. Montage, as such, will not come through a post-production editing process, but occurs and becomes manifest as a result of the procedural logic of the game engine + the incommensurable logic of the human operator/performer. In keeping with Eckhart’s intent, the final film will display all the p.o.v’s on one screen,  a tripartate montage of images and sounds, not created in post, but recorded “live” in real time. 

Even though we work with cutting edge technology, I start projects with paper and scissors and glue. Today, Cyril, who is now used to this came over to discuss what I’d come up with. (queerskins a novel queerskins.com began with a 100 page pile of collages that I showed Cyril at lunch one day. They were made on children’s colored construction paper as I’d work late at night after my two young kids were asleep and that was all I had available at the time I started.)

It’s wild to see how your mind builds on things–the delving into architecture and windows for viewing in our In My Own Skin project last year is taken up ten levels. In this project, architectural space and light actual become as integral to the film as the actors.

We will build a set based on radial forms –see the original plan for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome above.

In the final scene, I note that the Angel which manifests to the human as light is powerful force inspiring awe and terror.. Cyril and I spent part of our time today discussing “how does an angel see?” So, I look for this brain worm, later and find it on my shelf in Rilke’s Duino Elegies

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? And, even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consume in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying. ” So, I guess this has been living in my mind all these years, waiting to emerge!