#research phase 2

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TEST SHOOT

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[edens-edge-blog]

Landscape Magazine

To document our research and proceedings of the project, but also to create a platform to communicate outside of our team, we planned to publish a magazine throughout the course of the project.

During the first phase of research we came across J.B.Jackson's publication project Landscape. Jackson, a self-educated cultural landscape theorist , in his publication shifted  attention to surveying vernacular landscapes. He published the first volume  in 1951.

We find the idea to look for a Modern Vernacular landscape inspiring and see our own project in this tradition of thought.

For the first volume, it seems Jackson not only did the layout and graphical work all by himself, but also did he write the contributions himself taking on a wide range of different voices and topics.

Read more about J.B. Jackson here:  http://issuu.com/EdensEdge/docs/landscape_1/3

Sharing this aim to create a polyphonic spectrum of voices and ideas on landscape we decided to reissue three more issues of Landscape magazine as part of the Eden's Edge project.

See the results here: http://edens-edge.org/products/

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We caught up with the pilot of this neon green ultra light weight plane. He was in a hurry to get gas for his one seater since the sun was about to set behind the mountains but he told us about an annual meeting of ultra light pilots the coming weekend. "Maybe", we were thinking, "this is the opportunity to get our aerial view on camera.

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Enacting

The day came where we finally were ready to do a test shoot with an actor named Tyler. We had sent him one of the scripts we were working on the last weeks. I assumed that he would arrive and we could immediately start with our test shoot. But Tyler wanted some background information to be able to enter the character telling the story.

He came up with this story that I was the main character's son who tells his father, who has been in the military all his life, that he does not want to join the military but go to pastry school instead.

Then we walked on stage (which was our kitchen) and after a short moment of silence Tyler started to act and as he spoke to me I really got scared of him like a jung boy rising up against his strict and authoritarian father. That was a thrilling moment.

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I stumbled over an interesting website called grassroots mapping. Go here to tale a look. It is about creating open-source tools to include everyday people in exploring and defining their own geography. You will find inexpensive DIY manuals on how to build your own aerial photography tools, which I found very useful. One can also upload their photos to a program called aerial knitting witch merges all the photos made of a place to a map. The idea is “to enable a diverse set of alternative agendas and practices, and to emphasize the fundamentally narrative and subjective aspects of mapping over its use as a medium of control.“

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Markings

Today, just outside our house, we did first tests on how to draw marks onto the ground for our film sets. One method was to apply various materials, which we easily could get hold of. The other one was to subtract the topmost layer of sand with various tools. Check out the results:

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Measuring Tape

A question that arose during height-tests for an aerial view during the last couple of days is:  if we take a top down picture from 80ft above ground, how large will the captured area be?