Ink

Jamin Winans (dir.), Ink

Every so often I get completely floored by something visual. The first time I noticed it, I was at an Ansel Adams exhibit a few years ago. It's also been known to happen with sunlight and fog coming together just so, or twisty art-glass, or even a particularly arresting turn of phrase (Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro, for instance).

Those are all static images. They give me time to sit and drink them in and have my attempts at right-brain processing be overwhelmed. Something dynamic can do this too but it's much harder: my brain can shrug the image off and move on to the next one. Certain effects in Metroid Prime will do it, or the goldfish from Dark City.

Or Ink, from about the third scene on through to the end. Seriously. As soon as the first Storyteller appeared (and I do mean "appeared") on the screen, I was hooked. Transfixed. The sheer visual artistry. . . this, to quote Douglas Adams, is total adjective failure.

There's a plot. It's a good one. There's a mythos, and it's a bit weaker than the visuals deserve, but only a bit. (A world with so many literal hues deserves better than black-and-white Good and Evil.) There are characters. They have depth, and grow, and carry the story quite well.

I'm being deliberately vague, because a great deal of the fun, after the first two scenes, is trusting that the movie will tell you what you need to know, and being carried along on the ride.

See this. It's on Hulu for free, or for purchase on DVD direct from the producers (who are the director and his wife).

Ink

Weekend: I saw an amazing movie (tamnonlinear, you rock) and immediately ordered it on DVD, watched a snowstorm go from zero to six inches, got some gaming in, and talked with old friends for hours on end. (There's a part of me that's still shocked that I even have old friends.)

Mostly, this is about the aforementioned amazing movie. Here, have some trailers:
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Jamin Winans has also directed a short film entitled Spin, which sort of presages one scene from Ink. It's worth eight minutes of your time.

There's an interview with Winans where he says "It all started with one image. For me, that’s always how it starts. I’ll have a certain visual in mind and then ask questions from there. Why does this one image strike me? Who are these people? Why are they there? ... The whole story just grew from there." You can see that structure in the movie if you know to look for it, though if you don't it's a seamless presentation of awesomeness combined with just barely enough exposition.

Which is quite likely part of why Ink resonated so much with me, because that's exactly where my stories come from. One image, and cascading awesomeness and explanations from there.

I have a tendency to keep throwing new awesome things at a story long past the point where it needs to start being more coherent. This is something that I can learn to do. Mostly it's helpful to know that it's possible for something gobsmackingly amazing to come from that kind of process, that it's not just a creative dead end.