Messing about with rolls of carpet
As mentioned some time ago, I have been working on plans for a short film based on me seeming to run from Amsterdam across the countryside and to the sea, carrying a roll of carpet under each arm. These I will then throw into the sea. It’s a kind of allegory, with the carpets representing the past, worries, guilt, memories, and so on.
I finally got around to starting with filming this week; Julien kindly helped me on Wednesday, and Astrid on Thursday and Friday. Well, I can tell you, it has been exhausting work. These damn things are heavy! Not only that, but I have been using some old mustard-yellow carpet which I found on the street, perfect in colour, but it stinks. It smells like a incontinent dog died on it, and it transfers this awful stench to whatever it touches, too. So in a sense, it would indeed be a relief to throw them into the sea, except that for reasons of environmental responsibility I intend fishing them back out again (off camera).
The first day of filming took place in the area around where I live in Amsterdam; along streets, beside canals, over bridges, and even on the on-ramp of the motorway. I was quite nervous about the last of these, since apart from all the speeding cars, I had the idea that we would be arrested on the spot if the police were to pass. Passed without a hitch, though.
Thursday involved more filming, most of it on the beach at Camperduin on the Noord-Holland coast. I had picked this location after finding some piers that stick out into the sea on Google Maps (see above), which I thought would be great for running to the end of and very dramatically throwing the carpets.
This was all very well in theory, but it wasn’t so easy as I had hoped. For a start, it was impossible to really throw the carpets far enough so that they would really be in deep water. Furthermore, once they were wet they became too heavy to move any more, and in any case were dripping foul stinking brown water everywhere, which would look a bit strange on the second take, since at this point of the story they should still have been dry. The only thing to do was to unroll them and leave them to dry, and return again on Friday for another go. This in turn was still not great, and I will need to come back next week.
All in all, it is looking like being a lot longer and more complicated to realise than I could have imagined, but then that is almost always the case with my projects. The problem of course when filming outdoors is that there are so many variables over which you have no control whatsoever; the weather, the sea, curious passers-by honking their horns and asking questions at exactly the wrong moment, and so on.
As a sneak preview of the final result, here is a little video clip…
