What a productive day it was.
I placed in front of me a sheet of paper to jot down my ideas for my short film.
A child is in shared custody. He lives with his father, musician, in a trailer every other week; his mother, from a wealthy family, lives in a large house on the mountain overlooking the city. The little boy has friends both in his mother's wealthy neighborhood and everywhere his father takes him. It's his 7th birthday, and he wants to reunite all his friends and family.
This is my starting point. What happens next? Do all the friends really come finally? Where does he decide to party? At daddy or at mom's?
With Jericho, we agreed on the principle that our stories will be filmed from the point of view of the main character. So here the story will be told from the perspective of this 7-8 year old boy.
I wanted to write all this on my sheet, when a friend of a friend texted me to help me in my research on families who live in Quebec and Canada in trailers.
She told me about her dream of a "bus life". With two babies, a boyfriend and a dog, she leaves for the unknown next April. They are in the process of rearranging their bus so that they can all live there together for a few months and maybe years. At least before the oldest starts school. They will cross Canada, the United States and go to South America.
I still wanted to write my story on this sheet, along with other details I just learned. But before the feather hit the paper, the phone rang. An event in itself, because friends haven't called me since around 2017. Not without notice by text or email.
A longtime friend offered to go for tea. I jumped at the occasion, because I was looking forward to hearing from her for a long time. It turns out that she returns to Montreal after 10 years of absence. She does events and theatrical production and she seemed interested by our project. She gave me some advice about expanding audiences on the web and other marketing.
I also learned a lot of things about his life, it was really very interesting conversation. There are really people who are not cold-eyed and who move more than others. My friend is more of the academic nomad type: university degrees take her from one country to another.
All this to say that when I got home, I sat down in front of my white page to finish my ideas for a film.
This white page spent time alone on the table. The light, the humidity acted on it. In fact, shapes began to appear, especially at the bottom of the page, several signs, a kind of letters self-created by the paper.
So I decided to leave the white page on the table for a while. I think it has things to say to me. I'm not in such a rush to write down my film in words, because I'm already starting to see it in my head. In fact, I see it even better when the page remains abstract, like a canvas for projecting ideas.
And you, do you see anything related to this little boy with such an atypical family arrangement? A nomadic life, would that interest you? A very rich life, would you like that?
Look at the page for a while and see if any pictures come to mind. Please write in the comments whatever you see, even without apparent connection to my story.
In a few days I will try to decode what the page tells me.
See you next Sunday!