I Could Not Sleep For Thinking Of The Sky

Research and development 

Neon lights by Chris Doyle

Neon Lights (2014) is a short movie about the neon lights in Hong Kong. It was something that Anne suggested for us to watch, and I´m glad she did. Doyle´s film is very stylesddxsf, colourful and playful. I found it extremely aesthetic and enchanting, and I think it´s quite relevant to our documentary. First of all it´s focus is on lights, like ours. We will hopefully be using a lot of shots of lights around Farnham. Obviously they´re not as impressive as the lights in Hong Kong, but I think we will manage to make them look good. We´ve already filmed loads of traffic lights, christmas lights, fairy lights, shop lights, street lights etc. so hopefully we will manage to put it all together as well as in this film. I´m also going to link the way he uses interview as a way to carry the film onwards, which is something that we will be doing with our interviews. We will have three different people talking so hopefully it won´t be too confusing, but at least, between the three of them, they should say something interesting. With that I think the structure of Neon Lights is quite similair to our film. I´m trusting that we will be able to reach a similair level of poeticness.

We decided that our documentary should be constructed similarly to Dziga Vertov´s
Man with a movie camera, following a place from Morning to night. Similarly to Vertov, we´ll be walking around a place and filming day to day life.

We also went outside a couple of times, to get a better feel of what we should do, and to talk to people about when would be a good time to go out in their opinion and so on. Alya and Flora went once without me (when they talked to runners) and then we went the three of us together a couple more times. We filmed things around town and got some good shots of bin men and Gails opening on the 21.11.2019. We also talked to Emma on that day, and got her to agree to the interview and to let us film her opening her shop. On the 22.11 we went out and asked if the people at the kebab van would agree to an interview and talked to several taxi drivers, until one gave us his number. He said he´d think about it, and later on agreed to be interviewed. At some point we also talked to the dog walkers who we then filmed. The shots of the dogs with the lights on their collar made it to the last film. I think This going out and talking to people really help to clarify some things and helped us develop our documentary. I also think that talking to strangers so often boosted our confidence a little, so that next time we have a project like this it won´t be as scary to approach people.

I realised that I haven´t posted anything about our other ideas we had originally and why we went with the idea we went with so here it is. We originally had three ideas, the main one being the on we went with (day and night), and the two backup ones being, people waiting at bus stops and the sweet shop. I liked the night and day idea the best, when we were first thinking about it, and I think a lot of our class mates also like that one best.
Anne did seem to like the idea about people waiting at the bus stop, which could have also been really interesting. We would have interviewd them and filmed them waiting. We would´ve hoped for somebody doing something interesting. I think when people are bored they go into their own worlds, so maybe people would be doing things subconsiously. Mostly though I think people would just be standing around, be on there phones, or maybe be reading. This idea I think was heavily inspired by Lift, a documentary we watched in class. It would´ve been fun to get such interesting persinalities, as they did in that film.
I think the sweet shop idea would´ve been too dependent on wether or not the poeple who owned that shop had a good story or not. We also thought that filming the children might be a bit complicated, with the permissions and everyting. It would´ve maybe be fun though, to ask them a couple of questions and see what they say. I feel like children always have such wonderful answers.
However, based on the comments we got, we decided to go with the day and night idea. I think it gave us more space to be a bit more experimental and to explore Farnham in a different way. I also like that it was more poetic than just fact based. A lot of the poeple did say they weren´t sure about the animation, so I didn´t know if I was going to do it for awhile. Otherwise they were quite postive about it and said it could be visually strong and it would be interesting to exlpore people´s relationship to the sun and it´s cycles.

My notes from 5.11 the peer review:

A bit later on Josh joined our group so we rearranged our roles a little bit. Josh said he´d like to be involved in the edit and we also thought that, as he did English literature at school, he should write the poem (which he did, but it never got recorded or used). When we were talking about writing the poem for our documentary I immediatly thought of the poem below. I Could Not Sleep For Thinking Of The Sky is one of my favourites. I just think it´s really beautiful and although the topic could be seen as scary (the vastness of space and death) it has an oddly relaxing effect. It was kind of relevant to ours so I sent it into our group chat. (the sky, sun and the stars)

I Could Not Sleep For Thinking Of The Sky

I Could Not Sleep For Thinking Of The Sky

by John Masefield

I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,

The unending sky, with all its million suns

Which turn their planets everlastingly

In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.

If I could sail that nothing, I should cross

Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing;

Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss

Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,

And rage into a sun with wandering planets,

And drop behind; and then, as I proceed,

See his last light upon his last moon's granites

Die to a dark that would be night indeed:

Night where my soul might sail a million years

In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.

-from Lollingdon Downs