Well, it’s been a few weeks, so now’s a good time for me to introduce my first major project along this five year journey. It’s a screenplay for a feature tentatively titled Proud Flesh.

Proud Flesh is the story of Iris MacKinnon, an unassuming twenty-eight year old horse trainer who returns to her hometown for a friend’s wedding to find that she cannot escape the violent legacy of her family. She visits her long-abandoned childhood home, where a decade prior her entire family was slaughtered in a still-unsolved triple-homicide, a crime for which some in the community blame Iris. What she finds there shocks her, and leads her to try to uncover the mystery of her parents’ and sister’s deaths. The film borrows a lot from horror - there are grotesque supernatural elements to the narrative, though if it is horror, I suppose it’s closer to Peter Weir’s great horror films of the mid-to-late ’70s than a conventional horror-thriller.

Having plotted the film out, I’m going to do a scene-by-scene outline and compile the completely unorganized notes I’ve taken on a number of topics (horses, true crime books, skin diseases).

I’ve still got a short while before I can start the script in earnest, though I typed up an introductory scene a few weeks ago - this weekend I’m actually going to be writing a one-act play for a speed-writing festival they hold quarterly here at Dartmouth called Wired. Most Wired plays are unwatchable - my goal is to make something that’s barely above the cut. I’ve gotten hints that one of the ‘rules’ (we are limited by rules) is that we have to write a comedy. Oof. I’ll be sure to upload the play after the festival is over. I’ll also probably upload a (v.short) animated work I’m working on right now. It’s traditional hand-drawn 2-D work, which those of you who have seen my doodling know is a problem, but I’ve got two or three characters I’m working with that I kinda like, so who knows? Hopefully I’ll end up with something watchable. The goal of my spending the summer animating is more learning about animation than learning animation itself.

So that’s that. Upcoming posts: a review of the new Nelly Furtado album (which I’m writing for the D) as well as a delightfully masturbatory essay on the train as a point of cinematic signification (with specific reference to The Lady Vanishes and The Narrow Margin). Also, I’ll post soon about my new camera!

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