“In His Void”

(Estimated Run time: 2:10)

Treatment

By

Rishi S Bhilawadikar

For

LCC 6311- Visual Culture and Design

We don’t see him.

Yet, he stares up into the sky and looks to capture it. He fails. He lies prostrate – above him he sees a bare wall. He cannot see it, it remains elusive. He walks out into the darkness onto a street in search of it, only to witness nothingness around the corner. He moves quickly, but his world has halted.

The desk is without him. The room is like a colossal vacuum. The stairs leading to it seem to go nowhere. And now there is emptiness outside as well. The garden, the parking lot and the road – all the spaces feel blank.

Blue smoke rises on the screen and vanishes away as we see lights in a blurred space, the empty glass on atable, theblank piece of paper floating around in darkness and a lamp that does not glow.

The process begins again, he tries to revisit and look at the spaces and the objects differently. They only appear different offering him no help in his pursuit…

Concept: “In His Void” is a music video for my film “VOID: Imagine no Imagination”. There are multiple aims in making this video, the foremost being exploring emptiness as a concept – through spaces, objects and their variations/distortions/contortions. I use spaces and objects in the film as metaphors to depict a mind’s emptiness – with this video I want to explore the emptiness of spaces and object in their absolute form, stripped off any loaded or attached meaning.

My other aim (and challenge) is to create a narrative that acts as a prequel, if you may, to my film. How this can be conveyed without using the props as some sort of characters, will be an interesting challenge. Also, I intend to use the camera as my protagonist. The attempt would be to feel the emptiness that the protagonist feels. The video will try to conform tothe mood and theme of the film. Finally, I would also want to use it to promote my film.

Music credits go to Marc Carlton, my friend and colleague in making “VOID”.

Audience description:

I am looking at this as a portfolio piece, which I can showcase on my website. This is mostly an art/experimental piece. I will show this to potential employers to emphasize on my design and post-production skills (with Photoshop and After-effects). I would also like to get feedback from video artists and film makers. From an art perspective, the exciting part is that I am trying to use the camera as my protagonist and it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Project Plan:

Key Task Deadline

Treatment + Concept description / Fall Break
Story boards / Fall Break
Shooting and production / 11/1/06
Editing and post + rough cut / Thanksgiving
Final / Finals week

Technical hurdles:

No lighting, no crew and unsophisticated camera equipment. I do not expect to produce a fairly high quality video like the film itself.