I Spend My Mornings With Freddy is a short film I created using the sketches I made at The Rockefeller Centre.
It explores concepts of personal and private space, spaces in inside our minds versus the ones we physically reside in, and the apathetic and indifferent treatment we dole out to strangers, and the disabled. The film is meant to convey the idea of the eerie and terrifying silence, that masks the tumultuous minds filled with disillusionment and distress of a mind deeply disturbed and riddled with mental disease. It also explores themes of how we perceive disability, and and how this perception forces the disabled individual to dissociate himself or herself from society, while desperately grappling with his or her need for companionship.
Our protagonist is a mentally disturbed individual who struggles with understanding the difference between the world in his mind, and the one around him. The main protagonist has a raspy trembling voice, and their gender is left to the imagination of the audience. the protagonist’s movements are accompanied by scraping sounds, that make it seem as though he or she is dragging, a foot, or stick or bag, after him. I initially meant to add tapping sounds of a walking stick, because they would indicate the protagonist’s dependence on something external. His speech pattern and tendency to stand very close to other people, and get into their personal spaces while asking questions, indicates poor social skills, a distorted concept of space and distance. Oh and he is looking for Freddy.
This is supposed to invoke questions regarding the subjective nature of personal space.
How does the general radii of personal space differ for each person?
Even as the protagonist stands very close to them, and asks them questions that might make no sense to them, they remain still, their smiles frozen on their faces, their hands around their phones poised to take a picture, lips entangled in a kiss, and backs turned to the protagonist.
This is mean to raise the following questions.
How do the people of New York treat strangers and homeless people who behave strangely towards us on the street? When they get inside our personal spaces, mumble to us, harass us for money or heckle at us? Do we follow the golden rule of “if we ignore i it will go away?” Is passive indifference the only way out? What does that mean for us.
Another tangent, I meant to stimulate through the story line and visuals, narrative and background sounds was:
Are the people reacting but it is the protagonist who does not detect their reaction, due to him being incapable of associating that happenings inside and outside his brain?
Are the people not reacting because the narrator is living and recalling a memory?
Are the people not reacting because the world we are introduced to in first person seems frozen in time and must therefore not be the physical world at all, but the one that he trapped in, in his mind.
His or her inability to connect the two worlds, or decipher which world he or she is currently conscious of existing in, is indicated at the very outset of the film, when the opening shots convey a clear day loved by tourists, accompanied by the phrase, ” Another rainy day.”
These days I feel really curious about the diverse ways in which different people react to the same stimulus, and I deliberately made the film so that it would be open-ended and open to discussions about its various interpretations, so that I could make the film a more interactive medium of expression, and add dimension to the traditional form of video media, I have been exposed to so far.
How does the film make the viewers feel ?What general notions does it convey? What other interpretations does the audience come up with?How does an audience involuntarily associate a series of abstract visuals, and story line without a conclusive beginning or end, with ideas they are comfortable with, or have been informed about by means of the culture they have grown up with and ideas they have been introduced to, in order to make sense of that which they have seen?
I cannot wait for my class to watch the film so I can find answers to these questions.
