FoolishPeople

How do you read maps upside down?

I haven't shaved completely in years, because my naked face frightens people. It makes grown men scream like little girls. My shaving is apparently one of the signs of the apocalypse around here.

I mention this, purely for informational purposes. After all, the more signs and portents you know, the more you can prepare. You can check your almanac, your A to Z against the lie of the land, plan the route.

Provided of course, that you're holding the map the right way up, and it's the right map, you shouldn't have any real problems, right?

But what happens when you've got the map upside down, or back to front? We've all been in a situation where things don't make sense to us; maybe you've arrived in the middle of something, picked up a conversation half way through. Everything is full of unintelligible nonsense and you're damned if you can work out what's going on, because you have no clue what kind of frame of reference people are using.

You're in medias res. Stuck in the middle of things. Your beginning isn't the same as theirs. They started before you got there, damn their early-bird ways.

So now you have to stuggle to catch up - to throw yourself into the river and hope there'll be some familiar things to grab, like driftwood, or rocks; politics, religion, sports scores; something and anything you can latch onto, to pull yourself onto the boat and join the voyage properly as one one of the crew.

I wasn't around when FoolishPeople began, or when Enochian; Language Of Angels was being performed in the early nineties. I was busy doing other things. I wasn't around in 2011 when Strange Factories was being filmed.

Here's the thing, for as sure as angels are angels, it doesn't matter whether they have wings or not. It doesn't matter that it's 2013 and I wasn't around ab ovo ('from the egg'). Like you, I'm in the middle of things, here and now.

Because all we're always in the middle, always where the action is, struggling to make sense of things.

And as sure as eggs are eggs and the angelic choir of seraphim have wings of fire to cover themselves, something has happened, something called life. Somehow, that's where the magic happens - that's where the feathers fly.

Life doesn't give you a nice neat introduction, a significant pause to indicate that something is occuring. The house lights do not dim in a genteel way to attract your attention. That's a ritual of theatre, of Art.

That's taking the raw stuff of life, of that rushing river - the same one that you cannot cross twice, by the way - and carefully, deliberately crafting something.

We mutter something around here: "Art on the Inside. Blood on the outside."

Because when Art meets Life, the theatre might as well be consumed by a conflagration, obscured by a cloud of flame and feathers. And those angels, those watchers - that audience up in the Gods?

They'll have dirty faces from the smoke of Strange Factories. 

101 Things I learnt whilst directing my first independent feature - Part 1

Part I - Madness and Imagination 

The first in a ten part series sharing 101 things I learnt whilst writing, directing and producing my first feature.

1. Not all ideas are born equal. I completed three screenplays in total before the story of 'Strange Factories' even existed. None of them were right. 'GraveLand' was even set in the same location as 'Strange Factories'. I re-wrote many, many drafts to make 'GraveLand' the one, but it just wasn't. It was tough for me to accept, but I'm glad I suffered the process as the lessons I learnt over those re-drafts are immensely valuable. Don't willingly accept the first idea for a screenplay that comes to mind. You may need to clear some distance to reach the place in your imagination that holds the key to the right story.
2. It's easier to write a script for an incredible location than it is to find an incredible location for a script that already exists. 'Strange Factories' was written with full knowledge of the environment and location that we would be using. This location inspired and shaped the story.
3. You never have enough time to rewrite and you can never do enough drafts of your script. Leave time for another draft after your rehearsal period.
4. Fundraising and crowd funding require more focus, work and attention than any other element of pre-production. They're easily one of the most brutal elements of the filmmaking process. Be willing to get your hands dirty. You'll learn why having a pair of human eyes on your funding page means people are more willing to give money to your campaign, and this will feel like a small victory. If you take it seriously, you'll learn a whole set of skills that will aid you in the future, not only in filmmaking. I recommend picking up a copy of the 'Influential Fundraiser.'
5. Rehearsals are not only for actors. The more time you spend with your team working out how you'll shoot together, the better.
6. Your mind and body is as much a resource as your camera and your location. Making a feature film is a marathon. You need to be healthy and fit enough to not only direct, but to carry equipment and props (sometimes for miles and miles up very large hills if you can't afford transport). The entire process of making a feature on a tiny budget will push you to your limits and beyond. Don't underestimate how much you need to prepare and get fit before you start. Not only physically, but mentally too. A daily meditation routine is the reason I'm still here. 
7. Instincts are rarely wrong when it comes to what you feel you need to shoot. There are scenes in 'Strange Factories' that exist only because of mad moments of inspiration. I couldn't always explain why I needed them, but I just knew and some of these scenes have proven crucial to the story I wanted to tell.
8. You make your film more than once, some say it's three times: when you write the script, during the shoot and in the edit. I'd say it's more than three times. I'd count the rehearsal process and also how you choose to eventually share your story when you exhibit or unveil the work. You could also include the creation of any transmedia elements if they have depth and truly exist within the story world. The 'Strange Factories' live cinema event will be another chance to create and tell the story that first came to me four years ago.
9. I've never had much patience, but as a filmmaker I've learnt that patience is a prerequisite on many, many levels. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but wait.
10. Have faith, because if you don't have faith in your film, who will?.

That's it for part one, part two will be posted in late April.

 

Related articles

Emergence

How do you travel the strangest of roads?

What should we be willing to sacrifice?

Which way do you like your answers?

Someone once told me there were no answers, just things that allow you to ask more precise questions. Back then, I was studying Philosophy, so it sort of made sense.

Actually, I say that it sort of made sense, what I actually really mean is that it made total and utter sense. Bolt from the blue kind of sense. The kind of ephiphany usually reserved for soon to be prophets and/or religious zealots of any particular stripe.

I went so far as to grow the long hair and beard, of the kind associated with with Old Testament patriarchs. Sadly, at that point I lacked the requisite gravitas, and instead looked like a man who lived in a bush.

However, my lack of Old Testament chops withstanding, I soon realised that I was in somewhat of a minority. Most people, I am informed, like as little ambiguity as possible. It helps to plan your day, to determine right from wrong and that sort of thing.

And I'm not against planning things out, far from it. But, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men...something, something. But here you see what we're up against, because we automatically revert to tried and trusted ways.

Humans are fundamentally conservative. Even the most neophillic of you has a certain way they like to view the world, or some sort of framework for whatever it is they do.

So when a work raises more questions than answers, what then? When things get weird, and unpredictable, do you try and seek out a way to discover the sense of them? Do you build, try, test and model? Try to connect what you're experiencing with what you know, with what you understand?

Or do you let it wash over you, and experience it as-is?

You might think the first is more useful, and perhaps it is, but the fact is, the world is far vaster than your experience. There are always going to be things which raise more questions, for perfect modelling is not possible with our human hardware, and not even with our most advanced technology.

As it is, we're still limited to estimating, to shortcuts and best-fit lines. Which means there's always going to be a place beyond the edge of the map, a crazy, uneasy place where you're not sure what's going to happen.

FoolishPeople live there, in that place. In coming to experience our works, there's every possibility you'll go beyond your map, into an experience which won't conform to the standard question and answer set.

In this, perhaps magick and phantasy are more real  than what you think of as reality. More quixotic, chaotic, unpredictable and open to undreamt possibilities.

Why not come and find out for yourself?

How do you travel the strangest of roads?

Most of the time we don't really think about moving. We just do it, and the motor functions and muscles do the rest for us out of habit. It's automatism at its finest, muscle memory that works faster than thought.

But we've all been there when you're thrown into an unfamiliar situation; that moment when your frame of reference has shifted so mightily that everything seems unpredictable.

If we feel negative towards it, often the experience will seem threatening - we'll want to do everything we can to turn back to what we perceive as the status quo. But then again, there's a creative angle to such things - an inescapable newness that may inspire a sense of vast possibility.

Because there's now the chance that the simplest, most ordinary of things can and will assume a new meaning  for you. Because the unfamilliar, the unusual, the strange, and the uncanny forces you to re-evaluate, to fire up those faculties that you used to make sense of things.

Those same engines that were idling, merely ticking over before now, as awareness starts becoming important, because anything can and will happen. Because you're in a new situation, a new world where things work differently.

Your most ordinary of motions become infused with strangeness, and that's precisely what John was talking about in his last post on the Power of Nostalgia - the sense that you hang upon a precipice, or that the barriers, boundaries and screens which lend definition to your world are actually paper thin.

The fact that those very things you count on to make sense are fragile and subject to change is the reason behind the conservative urge, in the apolitical sense.

The Great British - or  English if you prefer - Strangeness with which Foolish People work is, in a sense, precisely about nostalgia in the melancholic Homeric sense. A kind of unease which permeates our work, illustrating the rhythms which exist in spite of human society.

An urge to return to an imaginal home where ritual and  shape may once again connect us to what it means to be human. To violate strictures of linear perception and immerse oneself in the deeply weird.

In that sense, it's unsurprising that the seventies and eighties in Britain were profoundly haunted; the spectre and the apparition may appear from nowhere. Antedilluvian spaceships may be unearthed amidst the concrete and modernist architecture. Ancient pagan rites emerge, fused with the insatiable curiosity of modern science. Atom bombs and athames, astrology and particle physics, nuclear power and telepathic children.

And this is the heart of Strange Factories - a story told in a pagan landscape. A landscape and place that is uncivilised, as the Romans named the countryfolk outside, in the provinces. There is a heretic heathenism to it - a journey down strange roads, with natives that do not obey the mores you know.

Perhaps calling Strange Factories cult cinema is far more accurate than it appears. Like the cult that surrounds Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, FoolishPeople perform rites and acts which may at first seem bizarre and occult in nature to outsiders.

But these rites and performances are at the heart of cultic practice, a shared excperience that bonds people and their environment together. The relationship one has with experience, with environment and culture, and with other people, is subtly altered.

That experience can break and reforge bonds in new ways, so that you may never see things quite the same again. In that sense, it is the nostalgic ache for the long-forgotten, dimly half remembered, that we seek to give you. For though you may not be able to ever go home, to go back, the very ache, the very strangeness provides you with a new awareness of youself and your origin.

The strange crooked roads are lonely and haunted, yet you will find many companions along the way, odd though they may be, and weird their ways. The Hum of Strange Factories is all around you, but its origin, and how you relate to it, is yours and yours alone.

Down Periscope - The Immersive Theatre of FoolishPeople

Sinking into the bath, feeling the water rise around you. Diving into the pool, breaking the surface and passing into another world. One that's all around us, a kind of noticeable density that you can feel against the skin.

Light is different – more diffuse. Sound is warped, becoming strange. You can feel ripples, movements through the medium, feeling other people without touching them though they're some distance away.

It's a whole different world – and you're no fish, are you? You can feel the difference, because you know somewhere else, somewhere unusual, with a different set of rules. When the rules are different, new possibilities occur, just because things operate in a different way than you are used to.

You can rise and fall, supported by this new environment, by its very density you can accomplish movements you would never be able to perform in the world from which you came.

Fully immersed, you affect the world. Your every movement changes things. You are like Archimedes, displacing his bath-water, just before he has he has his Eureka! moment.

Immersive theatre provides you with that other world – a whole different place to interact with. A narrative that keeps you close, that you can feel, touch and hear without the artificial distinction of audience and player.

It's time to learn to swim.

Good morning, welcome to the eschaton

This year has rewarded me with many powerful and memorable moments, both creatively and personally.

I started the year continuing the post-production for Strange Factories.

Strange Factories poster designed by Matt Needle

I worked on the edit with Bettina Fung, whilst also planning our official wrap party, a night of music and performance hosted by The Society of Vandals at the wonderful Jamboree Venue.

Photography by Yiannis Katsaris

The first footage from Strange Factories was screened alongside the release of our trailer. 

 

In April, Lucy Harrigan, my wife and FP Producer and Performer gave birth to Ethan-James Harrigan on Sunday 15th at 4:59am in our home.

Ethan is one of the greatest rewards this path has bestowed upon me. As some of you may be aware, Lucy and I met during the thirteen month Dark Nights of the Soul ritual at the Horse Hospital. Ethan would never have been born if it wasn't for the art we created together though this magical working that brought us together.

A week after Ethan's birth, I began writing the script to Virulent Experience, a collaboration with the South Place Ethical Society and Conway Hall with FoolishPeople's share of profits going towards the post production costs of Strange Factories. Rehearsals began in July, 7 weeks before the production opened on the 6th August.

Poster Design by Simon Allin

To date, Virulent Experience had the largest cast of performers and actors of any FP project and featured 17 artists, whose work was exhibited throughout Conway Hall as part of the Index of forbidden Novelty.

Virulent Experience was well received and this was due in no small part to Jim, Sid, Zia and the rest of the staff at Conway Hall as well as the hard work of the actors, artists and production staff.

FoolishPeople would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone involved with the project- we were extremely lucky to work with so many talented actors and artists.

Post production work on Strange Factories has continued throughout the year. Stephen Baysted, our Director of Sound, his team and Rich Aitken at Nimrod Productions have created a truly unique musical score and sonic environment for the film.

On July 23rd we had the first screening of Strange Factories at the Charlotte Street Hotel for the cast, crew and a special invited audience. As I sat with the audience, sensing their response to the film, I vividly remember reflecting on how it was one of the most special moments of my career.

In September I locked the final cut of Strange Factories. 

I'm happy to say that we'll be announcing the release date and sharing further news early next year on the next chapter of the Strange Factories ritual and its phantasmagoric theatrical release. Those of you who have supported our film from the very begining via our Indiegogo campaign will be the first to experience the live event and receive a special copy of the final film.

On 1st December FoolishPeople moved into its first non residential office space after many years of creating, writing and planning work in any space that was available to us.

Last week we began the final planning for the Strange Factories release, and I'm currently working on the outline to my next film, whilst editing the Virulent Experience footage shot by Will Wright and Mark Cadwell for release next year.

The work schedule this year has been relentless and has asked more from me than ever before. I will be honest there have been times when I thought I couldn't continue but I've learnt that if you have the patience and fortitude to endure, you will be rewarded. Life and art are a perpetual flux and Magick requires we continue to undergo change, however violent it may be to find the truth beneath the surface. 'Solve et coagula'.

FoolishPeople is very proud to announce that Craig Slee is joining us as a Writer and Creative Content Developer. Craig will be developing and writing the next cycle of the Strange Factories radiograms, which are an important element of the world we are building. In its final form the story will spread out from the film and exist within radiograms, books and of course the FoolishPeople event. All components of the machinery that power this ritual.

And what of you?

You are the most cherished and sacred aspect of our work, the most powerful force: the audience. It's within your mind that every possibility ever imagined takes place. 

Thank you once again for sharing the ritual space with us on this long, wondrous journey.

So, here we are on the 21st of December, at the end of the Mayan calendar and the end of one world.

Time ends, every second counts down the possibilities of what once was.

Consider a world beyond the tyranny of time and what is thought and accepted as possible and then perhaps we can manifest a future bright with every possibility.

See you on the other side.

'Art on the inside, blood on the outside.'

John Harrigan 

21/12/12

Related articles

Nova initia

Strange Factories - Trailer 2

 

The new 'Strange Factories' trailer is here.

If you'd like to experience FoolishPeople's 'Theatre of Manifestation', see our work in a live context and can't wait for the 'Strange Factories' tour, FoolishPeople's new immersive event 'Virulent Experience' opens at Conway Hall on the 6th of August and runs until the 31st of August 2012. 

Tickets are on sale now.

 

 

Lefteris Savva - Sound Recordist - Strange Factories

Lefteris is a Cypriot filmmaker based in London. In the past two years he has worked on more than thirty productions in various roles such as director, editor, gaffer and sound recordist.

Prior to his film school training, Lefteris studied History and Politics and had several jobs before turning to filmmaking. Lefteris has a longstanding relation to sound use and manipulation from his days as an amateur musician.

Strange Factories is Lefteris' first feature film and his first collaboration with FoolishPeople.

Yiannis Katsaris - Director of Photography - Strange Factories

Yiannis is a Greek photographer based in London who previously worked in Italy as a studio photographer. In 2005 he moved to London to attend the MA Photojournalism course at the University of Westminster and since then he focuses on documentary, portraiture and performance photography.

Yiannis works regularly for magazines, production companies and not for profit organisations. He has previously documented many of FoolishPeople's productions and has recently made the decision to extend his work into the realm of cinematography.

 

yianniskatsaris.com

Hettie (Annalisa Astarita)

Hettie was on stage when the mysterious fire started which destroyed the theatre.

Clowns know of the geisterwege, ghosts whisper in their ears of the spirit tracks, they share the maps to forgotten pathways and hidden roads.

Like all clowns, Hettie hides a secret.

 

Annalisa Astarita (Core Creative Team/"Hettie")

Annalisa is an English/Italian actress with a background in dance and music. Born in Sorrento, Italy, Annalisa was raised in Preston, Lancashire, and moved to London in 2003.

After travelling extensively on tour buses for many years her somewhat tumultuous lifestyle found focus and in 2010 she returned to London a full-time actress, having studied Method Techniques at the Lee Strasberg Institute, Los Angeles.