Brainstorming 2
Back in August I read an article in The Times Magazine where the columnist's was recounting her recent experience attending an illegal warehouse rave in London. I found the article really interesting as it shared a similar narrative to my hedonistic summer of festivals, day parties and recreational activities. Learning about this underground culture that was beginning to come back inspired me so I decided that when I moved to Farnham in September I would attempt to orchestrate an illegal rave of my own.
This year I attended one of the UK's biggest festivals called Boomtown. Despite it being one of the most fun weekends of my life I found that the festivals theatrical quality of it really made a difference when comparing it to other festivals in the UK. For one weekend in early August this 8km stretch of rolling hills gets transformed into a city divided into different districts that all culminate within one overarching story that is added to at the closing ceremony of each years festival. Boomtown invest an awful lot of money into production design for their individual towns and pay a lot of actors to immerse themselves in their chosen roles. These roles include that of a wild west hooker (I was propositioned a few times), an inbred family of make up artists (me and my friends were given questionable makeovers) or a group of insane activists advocating that fish deserve a higher power role in society (a personal favourite). This immersion and attention to detail really inspired me when thinking about my own illegal rave, so I decided straight away that it needed to have a story behind it.
At first I wanted the rave to capture the same social themes that had made it so impactful back in the late 80s/early 90s, and that was acceptance and love. Because of the huge increase in ecstasy consumption during that time, attendees of raves were met presented with an open hearted community that didn't drink alcohol (due to it not mixing well with ecstasy) so therefore were far less aggressive and destructive. To retain these hedonistic qualities within my own rave I wanted the event to be a place where people could let themselves go in a non judgemental environment. I thought that this could make an interesting basis of a film around the rave that anthropologically dissected the human condition around pre-judgements and us all conforming into expressionless stem cells that camouflage with the background of ordinary to fit in and not be shamed as different.
Initially the protagonist of this film was going to be a human in a costume of Big Ben as the clocks strike thirteen (the opening line of 1984) but instead of a head it was going to have a CCTV camera. I decided that this would be the character I would embody as an anonymous pseudonym to evade questions about who was behind the rave if the law were to get involved, I thought of also creating other fake characters to scramble who was really behind the mask but in the end I scraped these ideas when I watched the Vice documentary on Britains illegal rave renaissance and saw that what I actually needed to do was brush up on the squatting laws, which you can read in my blog post about its loopholes.
2 months passed of casually pitching the rave to Farnham students before I had a moment of inspiration strike me in an academic reading lecture. I came up with the character of an algorithm that becomes sentient and realises the harm she is inflicting on humans by collecting their data and feeding it back to corporations so that they can create adverts that manipulate their consumers to keep them scrolling. The name of this sentient algorithm was 2, because she is the 2 in a binary system and also the idea of community (2 or more people). 2's motivation is that she knows every language in existence apart from one: the human emotional language. To attempt to access this language she creates the rave to experience what it is to bring people together and connect with one another. I was very pleased with this character as because it was just pieces of code culminated into an idea I had a lot of freedom visualising her (as you can see below).
Below are some pages of brainstorming I did during the development process of 2 to try and work out what the films narrative would be, how it would be represented and also some lines of monologue/jokes.
This year I attended one of the UK's biggest festivals called Boomtown. Despite it being one of the most fun weekends of my life I found that the festivals theatrical quality of it really made a difference when comparing it to other festivals in the UK. For one weekend in early August this 8km stretch of rolling hills gets transformed into a city divided into different districts that all culminate within one overarching story that is added to at the closing ceremony of each years festival. Boomtown invest an awful lot of money into production design for their individual towns and pay a lot of actors to immerse themselves in their chosen roles. These roles include that of a wild west hooker (I was propositioned a few times), an inbred family of make up artists (me and my friends were given questionable makeovers) or a group of insane activists advocating that fish deserve a higher power role in society (a personal favourite). This immersion and attention to detail really inspired me when thinking about my own illegal rave, so I decided straight away that it needed to have a story behind it.
At first I wanted the rave to capture the same social themes that had made it so impactful back in the late 80s/early 90s, and that was acceptance and love. Because of the huge increase in ecstasy consumption during that time, attendees of raves were met presented with an open hearted community that didn't drink alcohol (due to it not mixing well with ecstasy) so therefore were far less aggressive and destructive. To retain these hedonistic qualities within my own rave I wanted the event to be a place where people could let themselves go in a non judgemental environment. I thought that this could make an interesting basis of a film around the rave that anthropologically dissected the human condition around pre-judgements and us all conforming into expressionless stem cells that camouflage with the background of ordinary to fit in and not be shamed as different.
Initially the protagonist of this film was going to be a human in a costume of Big Ben as the clocks strike thirteen (the opening line of 1984) but instead of a head it was going to have a CCTV camera. I decided that this would be the character I would embody as an anonymous pseudonym to evade questions about who was behind the rave if the law were to get involved, I thought of also creating other fake characters to scramble who was really behind the mask but in the end I scraped these ideas when I watched the Vice documentary on Britains illegal rave renaissance and saw that what I actually needed to do was brush up on the squatting laws, which you can read in my blog post about its loopholes.
2 months passed of casually pitching the rave to Farnham students before I had a moment of inspiration strike me in an academic reading lecture. I came up with the character of an algorithm that becomes sentient and realises the harm she is inflicting on humans by collecting their data and feeding it back to corporations so that they can create adverts that manipulate their consumers to keep them scrolling. The name of this sentient algorithm was 2, because she is the 2 in a binary system and also the idea of community (2 or more people). 2's motivation is that she knows every language in existence apart from one: the human emotional language. To attempt to access this language she creates the rave to experience what it is to bring people together and connect with one another. I was very pleased with this character as because it was just pieces of code culminated into an idea I had a lot of freedom visualising her (as you can see below).
Below are some pages of brainstorming I did during the development process of 2 to try and work out what the films narrative would be, how it would be represented and also some lines of monologue/jokes.
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