The Garage - MUBI / Vimeo Plus

I was contacted by The Garage at MUBI (http://mubi.com/users/133502) to link 'The Astral Woman' on their site. I did so, you can see it's project page HERE.

I updated my Vimeo membership to Vimeo Plus a little while back to submit 'The Astral Woman' to the Vimeo contest, it didn't get in. Anyway, with Vimeo Plus you can view Statistics of your videos. The whole thing is a little disheartening. So far, 'The Astral Woman' has 487 loads with only 19 plays and only 2 played all the way through! Now, granted, the credits are a bit long for a 4min video and I will admit to often stopping a video when the credits start (terrible, I know), but still! Only 19 plays out of 487 loads! Jeeze. I don't know what the general statistics look like on Vimeo, but that's quite the average...

The Astral Woman

Here is my 4 min short, 'The Astral Woman'.

The Astral Woman from Cait Davis on Vimeo.

In many cultures, The Astral Man or The Cosmic Man is a symbolic representation of the human beings potentiality towards wholeness. The symbol can also be seen as a symbol of Self. "According to the testimony of many myths, the Cosmic Man is not only the beginning but also the final goal of all life--of the whole of creation." (Marie-Louise von Franz, “Man and His Symbols”) This symbol is sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite, to show the joining of opposites, though quite often is represented by a white male human being. In “The Astral Woman” I have begun what I hope to be a small series of various short films that start to re-define the masculine dominance in our cultural history. I want to take strong and meaningful concepts and replace the dominant image with something different.

And then this happened...

Went to my parents house this weekend. My dad and I didn't talk much about the Helen script, mostly I just relaxed. I read a book, watched movies, took a bath, hung out with my dog and went out in the woods. I had an all around relaxing time.

In my last post, I mentioned that I would relay something further about IFP. IFP is Independent Feature Project and they host Independent Film Week. It's a week long event where filmmakers are introduced to agents, managers, distributors, producers, etc. to talk about a current project(for which the filmmaker submitted at an earlier date). My dad and I submitted to IFP film week back in...April, I think it was. They accepted 25 scripts in development for the Emerging Narrative section of the film week, and the script my dad and I have been working on was accepted! I submitted as writer/director, my dad as co-writer--though he wont be attending the film week. We are listed on indie wire here: http://www.indiewire.com/article/150_New_Films_IFP_Project_Forum/P0/

We're on the 2nd page, 8th project down.

I've been handling a few deadlines and prepping for the week event. I had my script consultation and I'm going to update the script soon. Most recently, I've been preparing "The Alchemist Makes Gold" and "The Astral Woman" to be burned to DVD so that I can share some 'past work' with any reps that might be interested in the projects I'm working on or have been working on.

The Alchemist isn't very far along. Well, I mean, it's edited--has been stitched together, but it doesn't have any sound design done and none of the graphics work or color correction. The DVD media is due by August 31! I've been doing some basic stuff and I gave all the sound over to some folks who said they'd be willing to help out, but as of yet we haven't been able to touch base about everything. It's a little nerve wracking to have all of this stuff going on and to be working a full time job, but I really feel like things are going well--or at least sometimes I feel that way. Today I feel that way.

Tonight I'm going to a meeting for an art project called "INTERSECTION" (project website: http://projectintersection.org/ ). I only joined forces recently and haven't really done a whole lot with them, but they seem like a neat group of people and the project is interesting. It's good to have some project distractions that aren't your personal burden. Plus, it's fun to spend some time with interesting folks.

Anyway...yep.

The Astral Woman - The Shoot

The shoot went well. We shot from about 7pm until 6am and then I had to go to work. It was a rough day, but I feel good about things. Because we had a small crew and not a whole lot of pre-production work, set-ups took a fairly long time and we had to cut a number of shots to get finished even by 6am.

Last night and this morning I started converting footage and laying it into a timeline. The shots we got look great, hopefully it all comes together.

The Astral Woman - shoots on Tuesday

Hello. It's Sunday and The Astral Woman project shoots on Tuesday.

I've gotten most of it together. I still need to paint a box red and remove this wooden divider from the inside.

I got the ostrich egg. Here's a creep photo of me holding it...

The Astral Woman

The Astral Woman is a short short I wrote. It's a dialog-less film that symbolizes a woman moving towards wholeness. It's a reinterpretation of the classic symbols of self realization that were mainly masculine figures, at least in our (European/American) history. The Astral Man or Cosmic Man is a figure symbolizing the joining together of the different aspects of a person into a complete and whole being sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite and sometimes as a masculine figure. In the case of the short, the person playing the Astral Woman is a dark skinned woman who has often been referred to as androgynous. She's a beautiful young lady and I think her appearance adds a new reference for the concepts of how a whole self can be represented.

This past weekend, I met with a woman named Luiza who works one day a week at my job. She's interested in producing or production managing and she's on board with the short short, to help move it along into and through production. Then I emailed everyone in preparation for the shoot, getting together the minute details that bring everything towards completion. We plan to shoot at the end of May.

I'm itching to have more work posted. I haven't created any new videos for some time now. Some time soon I want to shoot the test roll of Super8 that I have, to find out if this Super8 camera my friend lent me works, since he wasn't sure. I just need to get some more stuff out there, for my own piece of mind.

Anyway...yep.