#This is your friendly reminder that every action you take is laced with horror and every moment of joy has an opposite <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[the-magpie-archives]

Oddly specific, mundane things that are aligned with the 15 fears:

The Eye- Making deep eye contact with a stranger on the platform as the train pulls away.

The Hunt- Wanting something so badly that you can't stay still anymore.

The Buried- Trying to get your phone back when it falls between your bed and the wall

The Vast- Being a child and hearing about how unknowably large Chuthulu is for the first time.

The Flesh- Looking in the mirror and realising your body's changed since the last time you really looked.

The Lonely- Realising you're the only customer at the supermarket.

The Corruption- When you see one ant but once you've focused on it you can see the rest of them.

The End- Holding an antique object and knowing that it's original owner is long dead.

The Desolation- That gut wrenching feeling when you've lost something you know you're not going to be able to get back.

The Stranger- Looking into the eyes of a loved one and not being able to see anything you know in there.

The Spiral- When you say something loud enough to be heard and absolutely nobody processes it or responds.

The Dark- Straining your eyes to try and see something at the end of an unlit corridor that you swear you could almost see.

The Slaughter- Ripping up a letter with your full name and address on and throwing it in the bin.

The Extinction- Being the last player left alive in a survival game and realising that in another life that could happen for real.

The Web- That burning, guilty feeling after you're manipulated into doing something you didn't want to do.

[joannabethharvelle]

@cullxtheherd from [ x ]

His hand raises and instinctively Jo flinches, shoulder lifting and face turning to the side in anticipation of some sort of retaliation. Instead she is met with raucous, rasping, rattling coughs, deafening in the otherwise quiet room. Wrists ache as she moves them to push herself just a little farther back into her corner. Foggy brown eyes lower to focus on the finger he has leveled at her and she is uncertain if it is her vision that is wavering or his hand. The harder she focuses the more the edges of her vision distort and finally she has to blink and look away, head pounding behind her eyes. Shifting her body so that she is protecting more of herself from the considerably larger man, she takes the risk of letting her guard down a moment to palm at them to try and rub the sting away in vain.

She hears him talking, the words’ slipping and echoing in her ears. Threats turn her blood cold as she flinches through his highs and lows from her spot on the mattress, silent for the time being. Jacob speaks in a way that comes across as entirely unhinged, the unpredictability of his mood and behavior promising something much more dangerous. From the things she’d heard about him, however, she figures that he is much more in control then he lets on. Hopefully.

A soft, cracked yelp of surprise crests her lips when he drops the empty dog bowl onto the floor, unaware that her head had begun to loll to the side, eyes heavily lidded and feeling heavy as lead as she tries to force them open once more. Metal clanks and wibbles, the bowl rolling on its edges just for a moment before rattling to a rest on the ground in front of them.“Want what filled?” The question is slurred slightly, asked much too long after he’d turned away, her mind still working slowly. She isn’t sure if he hears or if he is simply ignoring her, and after a moment of deduction her gaze slides to dirt streaked silver and she is able to answer her own question. “The bowl?” 

“Ha, you’ve gotta be fucking joki -” 

The command to Elvis is missed almost entirely in her concentration, the oddity of Jacob showing what appeared to be affection toward something not quite pinging her radar. When the wolf makes a move her sentence is cut off with a choked sound and she’s pressed herself up against the wall again in an instant, pulse elevating rapidly and the remaining stupor momentarily chased away by a quick surge of adrenaline. Eyes scan the room, looking for something -- anything to use for protection, and finally settles on what looks to be the end of a pipe, potentially within reach and peeking out from the shadows that vingetted the office.

Her body language screams her thought process, all tact lost in the hedging panic and remaining haze. A split second before she shifts Elvis is rumbling out a warning, one that Jo feels in her bones and her rash decision is quickly abandoned. Jacob’s warning commands her attention and for the moment she is obedient, enforced by the deep rooted fear of the large canine. 

“They’re not my friends...” the phrase is muttered almost habitually at this point; she’s perfected a sort of bitterness around the words, as if perhaps she’s been massively inconvenienced by agreeing to help the residents here. Jo has been certain to vocalize her separation of herself and the denizens of Hope’s County from the get, emphasizing and pushing the idea that they meant nothing to her personally; that they had similar goals at best. It was contradicted at every turn due to her actions, but Jo clung to a sliver of hope that if a situation like this should arise that they wouldn’t be used as leverage.

Eyes widen and her stomach drops when he mentions following her and nervously she curls her fingers, short nails biting into the fitted denim of her jeans. That trip hadn’t even been about cult business. She hadn’t alerted any of the siblings, and made very little to no fuss while she’d been out. She’d told no one, other than the tweaky little bastard that accompanied her -- he reminded her of a bit of an old friend from years ago at the Roadhouse and had actually started to grow on her -- and the Peggies hadn’t seen them. They hadn’t been detected by anyone, she was sure of it. And yet, somehow...

Blonde falls in front of her face, clinging to her forehead as she leans forward, arms wrapping around herself as much as her restraints let her. The heels of her boots rouche the fabric as they slowly slide down the bed, finally falling once they’re stretched out straight in front of her, feet dropping open in a dejected sort of release of tension.

The implication that she was doing all this to impress him makes her skin crawl, the corners of her mouth turning down in a disgusted expression. 

A knock gives her a start, eyes narrowing slightly as her gaze follows the slow, heavy thud of her captors’ boots to the door. Their behavior immediately piques her interest; hushed tones in stark contrast to the earlier examples. Brown eyes drift from the door to the wolf, and she has to close her eyes for a moment to compose herself before she decides to shift. Jo is careful to be silent and very, very slow -- fingers press into the mattress as she moves to lower herself as far as possible, almost lying down fully.

Its bits and pieces, but the things she does hear mostly just confuse rather than clear anything up. Eyes narrow as she tries to identify the boots on the other side and doing her best to burn details into her memory. 

Peaches -- The messenger boy... same one as before, judging by the nickname. Staci, he’d just said?

Deputies -- It was, then. Must be. Staci had gone missing the first goddamn day here, when everything went to shit. She’d barely gotten to meet him, but Jo knows he is one of the missing. The other deputy, too. They were alive, at least for now. It was promising.

Rachel -- Who?

Blessed fucking Angel -- The Angels. It was this nickname that had been among the things to spark Jo’s interest from back home in the very beginning. Reports from this place dripped with imagery and phrasing that indicated that this was a job dealing with creatures, but no. This isn’t what she had expected at all. These were people. People were on an entirely different level. There were no rules.

She almost zones out for too long, recognizing Jacob’s dismissal almost too late and just managing to slide back to a sitting position before he turns around. She doesn’t bother answering him yet, eyes trained on his lower legs, following his movements as he fusses with the record player. It isn’t until it finally spins to life and the song crackles through the speaker that Jo makes a sound; a bitter, disbelieving huff as the recognition of the song sets in after the first three notes. Her gaze slides up to meet his even if he refuses to do so too, disdain painted clearly on her features, brown eyes shooting daggers that would be laced with poison were it possible. 

Jo intends to try and hold eye contact through the entirety of the song but the music picks up and all at once the subtle horror of the situation finally processes. Fear makes her hands tremble faintly against the mattress, the atmosphere he’d set extremely disturbing and unsettling. The upbeat song lifts and falls joyfully, crescendos bright and flourishing as the two of them face off in a cold, dark silence. The snaps of his holster finally break her concentration, attracting her attention to the red pistol that reflected the orange firelight in an even deeper crimson.

“Sure is.” Her voice isn’t the strongest when she finally finds it but she does her best to keep the waver out of it. Her head tips to the side slightly as she looks away from the pistol and up at him, glaring darkly through her lashes. Fingers curl around cold metal and she lifts her wrists, showing the restraints he currently has her in. “Why don’t you take these off and I’ll show you some real toe tappin’.” Jo is able to manage a smile, dark and laced with something that was nowhere near friendly. “Why don’t we dance, Jacob Seed?”

Fear still threatens to get the better of her but she continues, unsure if its that or anger that finally does makes her voice quiver. Her words aren’t loud, just enough to be heard over the song, and she leans forward to hiss at him through her teeth. She is unwilling to actually move at the moment -- the wolf keeping her more in check than the man in front of her at the moment.

“You know that I don’t need a single damn person to come rescue me. You know I can do it myself. I know you do. The gun, the wolf, these?” Again she lifts her hands, much weaker this time as her energy begins to fade again, eyelids threatening to slide half closed. A huffed laugh is exhaled as she leans against the wall to find a bit of support, the half smile still on her lips. “You can’t watch me forever. You’re gonna have to leave me in here alone at some point. And when you do? I’m getting out. I don’t care if I have to break both of my fucking wrists myself to do it.”

A shuddering breath finally cuts her off, chest rising and falling as the chorus of the song slices through the silence, irking her as she tries to fight off the hazy exhaustion that quickly encroaches. She falls silent, not wanting to end up passing out again, and tips her face up toward the ceiling. Eyes slip fully closed and she breathes deeply through her nose, fending off dizziness as best as possible and trying to keep the bed from feeling like it was going to spin.

“And it’s not ‘girl’, by the way. Its not ‘kid’ or ‘darlin’’ either...” Her tone isn’t so vicious this time, almost rambling as her self control starts to slip again. “I have a name for a reason, so you should use it.”  She isn’t sure if he actually knows it; considering she’s never heard any of the Seeds ever address her by it. Against her better judgement she continues, a bitter amusement lacing her slurry voice.

“That’s not your fault, I guess. We never got officially introduced so you’ve got an excuse for being stupid.”  Her vision blurs a little and she blinks heavily, moving her hands to rest in her lap as the song begins to wind down, allowing her to lower the volume of her voice as well for the moment.

“It’s Jo. Harvelle, if you’re feeling spicy.”

[mrmichaelchadler]

Short Films in Focus: Bartleby

It’s hard to believe that in all the years of covering short films that I had yet to write about one based on a classic short story. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” (first published in 1853) has been adapted into two features, but the story works perfectly well as a 10-minute, wordless, animated short. True to the original story (mostly), this new version offers no clues into the inner workings of one of the most frustrating and baffling co-workers anyone could ever encounter. He’s an anomaly, a paradox and seemingly not from our world, except that he looks human, knows how to land a job, where to show up for work and can wear a tie. 

But he's functional: When Bartleby shows up for his first day at work in a Wall Street office to do some mundane data entry, he does so at great speed that puts all the other workers to shame. He talks to no one. He has nothing to say, but he can do the work, at least until he “prefers not to,” a phrase that will haunt the boss man in charge for the rest of his days. “I prefer not to” is the only answer Bartleby will give when asked to do his work or show up for a meeting. He has simply stopped and refuses to budge. He also never leaves the building. He remains stuck in the corner and requires no help from anyone. 

Directors Laura Naylor and Kristen Kee have modernized “Bartleby” for the age of computers and email, making Bartleby’s behavior that much more confounding. They have also smartly chosen to tell the story almost entirely visually—when characters speak, letters spill out from their mouths, sometimes forming words, while we hear the sounds of old printers and fax machines take the place of human voices. This reminded me of another claymation marvel, Aardman’s “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” which also did away with dialogue in favor of grunts and mumbles. It works especially well here, because what else do we need to hear from them besides those four annoying words? 

Naylor and Kee have made a wonderful adaptation that is laced with dark humor and a real sense of tension and despair at having to deal with this oddball. The character renderings are perfect. Bartleby himself looks like a human blank page and the boss looks like the kind of guy who has seen it all—until today. “Bartleby” is a story maybe we’ve seen or read before, but this version, like Melville’s original story, will still have some mysteries and unanswered questions by the end, but nothing that will feel unsatisfactory. Decades after first reading Melville’s story and seeing the 1971 version, I still have no idea what Bartleby’s deal is and that’s just the way it should be. 

How did this project come about?

KRISTEN KEE: We were both smitten with Melville’s “Bartleby” and with the medium of stop-motion. One thing Laura and I bonded over early is we were both raised Mormon, but dropped out as young adults. Right around the time I was thinking about leaving the church, I found Bartleby—the idea of preferring not to make a ton of sense from that angle. In a stubborn, teenage way. Fast forward several years, both of us out of art school working drab office jobs in midtown, with art as a side hustle. We both definitely preferred not to spend all day in cubicles, and almost literally rediscovered Bartleby as a kind of self portrait. So that’s how we came to the story. On the medium, Laura’s background was in film, and mine was in sculpture, so stop-motion seemed to be this perfect intersection of our skill sets. And with Bartleby as stop-motion, there’s also a beautiful rub: you have a lead character who prefers, by the end, to essentially do nothing, and we’re telling his story in this incredibly time and labor intensive medium. It’s a perfectly backwards choice because there is no “preferring not to” in stop-motion. Plus Melville’s Bartleby is so open-ended, and so ambiguous in its visuals, it was ripe for an experimentation-friendly, build-your-own-reality medium like stop-motion. We kept asking ourselves, “how does this not exist already?!”

Where did the idea of the floating letters and dialogue come from?

LAURA NAYLOR: We wanted to layer in repeated references to the physical world of text, to Bartleby and Melville’s world and to the way we both first experienced the story. On a more abstract level we were also trying to have the text effectively become a character of sorts. The animated letters were also this great tool we could play with to express the mounting tension between Bartleby and his boss. The mutated, evolving text hive also points to some of the liberties we took with the story itself (setting it in ~2011 Wall Street, adjusting names/genders of characters, changing the ending). Frankly, it was also a kind of elegant and hacky solution to one of the constraints of stop-motion—specifically, it’s incredibly time and labor intensive to animate speaking parts in stop motion, so making the film “silent” enabled us to actually, well, make it at all.

What sounds are we hearing in place of dialogue?

KK: The audio you hear when the characters are speaking is sampled from old, early tech printers. That was another way for us to subtly allude to Bartleby’s literary and textual origin story. The printer sounds were actually the brainchild of our amazing sound and music team, Deniz Cuylan and Brian Bender of Bright + Guilty. We were kind of shocked by how rich the collaboration with them was. We would give those guys notes—a couple of artists and a few tonal descriptors (minimalist, dissonant, occasionally wistful, saggy with ennui)—and they’d consistently come back to us with clearer, purer, better versions of what we’d tried, but largely failed, to describe. We felt like we lacked the vocabulary to articulate what we wanted, but they understood us anyway. They made the film so much better.

The lighting here looks very specific. What were some of the challenges (if any) related to the lighting?

LN: Our wildly talented DP, Zach Poots, lights a stop motion set like you would a live-action film: lots of practical lights (all of lamps and computer screens actually emitted real light), lots of lights shining in windows from all angles, just all teeny tiny. One of the main challenges with stop-motion is the tight quarters (working on a set ~1/8 the size of humans), and Zach had to figure out a place to put all the lights while still leaving our awesome lead animator, Josh Mahan, room to manipulate the puppets. When you’re lighting 20,000 photographs that will be stitched together to create a film, consistency is key. Bumping a light during the middle of an all day 8-10 second shot could mean starting over from the beginning! Zach was a master at the fun technical stuff, too, like creating lightning and TV flicker by calculating shifts over a series of photographs. Kristen's and my directorial vision was to create the rich, subtly moody, jaundiced palette you see in the final film without over-indexing on those dark creepy vibes—and ending up in some uncanny valley of horror or pastiche. It was also fun to use lighting shifts to echo the interior world of the characters. For example, as the employer starts unraveling, the lighting breaks from realism and reflects his exaggerated, fractured fears.

I like that you kept the original names. Were there any other elements of the original story you felt you had to get just right?

KK & LN: So many things! One big one was maintaining Bartleby’s enigma-like nature. We didn’t want to over-explain him, or narrate away the many possible interpretations of the original story. We also really wanted to retain the dynamic between Bartleby and his boss that Melville drew so well. Bartleby’s boss—who does not have a name in the book, thus we named him REM after Melville’s description of him as a “rather elderly man”—has a wide and complicated range of reactions to Bartleby’s refusals, and we were really trying to capture the full spectrum. We also loved some of the little details, things like the Roman statesman bust, Nippers’ irritability, Turkey’s drinking problem, and the little partition that separates Bartleby from the rest of the office (“the green screen” as we called it). The things we felt comfortable tweaking (time period, gender, REM’s death fantasies, ending) were the components we felt weren’t integral to those core character traits or to the meat and bone of the story. Our editorial adjustments were meant to extend and amplify, more like asking vs answering questions about Bartleby’s story. What does “preferring not to” mean in contemporary Wall Street vs the developing Wall Street of the mid 19th century? Questions like that.

What’s next for you?

LN: I’m in post-production on an observational documentary feature following a group of laborers who harvest grapes every year at a famed champagne domaine, but am eager to jump into another stop-motion project soon.  

KK: I’ve been focused on (non-animated) neon sculpture and learning Javascript for an upcoming generative art exhibit, but am also working on a stop-motion script about young mormons. Would love to dive back into animation when this wraps!

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