DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

How about this for a logline: Renowned music photographer takes a break from his successful career to work with puppets in a barn. Based on a true story! I have a lifetime of experience swinging a camera around but I’m relatively new to thinking about story and expressing ideas through moving images. It’s a steep curve. Fully aware of my privileged credentials as an old white man, I’ve turned my sights inward, focusing on Epistemology, world building with old junk, and sewing! I’m challenging myself with the difficult undertaking of making a stop motion animation series using the genre of Science Fiction as my spring board. Sci-Fi is basically like a western in space, usually about rugged individuals navigating a harsh desolate terrain, a grand metaphor for the basic struggles we all face.

With The Dark Odyssey, I was thrilled by the idea that I could completely fabricate a whole world from scratch, and I wasn’t tied to the constraints of having to replicate a miniature version of anything from our world. I’m making my own myths. It’s a very slow experiment. I worked on ICE NEXUS almost every single day for two years. What’s the rush? I’m retired. And I’m excited about the process of discovery, digging out little pieces of hidden meaning and holding them in my hand, examining ideas and throwing them back in the mix. I use the magic of cinema to bring inanimate objects to life, give them universal characteristics and basic emotional drives. The discussion is a cryptic one, of lofty philosophical ideas like Plato’s Forms and Locke’s Theory of Mind, and I’m looking for answers using the metaphor of puppets in a theatre of shadow and light. So, is The Dark Odyssey just another supernatural action movie, with portals to other universes and mythical beings, or is it a metaphysical exploration of the nature of consciousness, a story looking into an unknown world searching for the meaning of existence here in our own? Either way, Welcome the Spider!