From the archives: piece of abandoned film, 2015 (Patreon)

Hello all! This is NOT a scene from the film I'm making now, but the only finished shot from a film I started in 2015, before giving up and making Double King instead.

"Gnostrum" was going to be a film about whaling in Australia. The story was largely inspired by a real town, which in the early 1900s clearly had too many dead whales lying around, because they started cutting holes in the sides of their carcasses and charging people to bathe in them, as an alleged cure for rheumatism. That was a real thing!

I wasn't going to do the bathing thing specifically, but I was fascinated by the excessiveness of plundering the environment for something as huge and precious as a whale, not even for food or resources, but for a cartoonish superstition dreamt up by a snake oil salesman.

I don't want to close the door on this idea completely because it still appeals to me, but years later I made a different film about a beached whale, small-town coastal Australia and our fractured relationship with the environment in my short film DRY RUN, which while pretty different may still render this one redundant.

The only reason I remembered this abandoned film, is because the shot I'm currently working on for my NEW film is also of a series of boats along a dock, and while trying to work out how to design it I remembered that I've done this once before. So once again I hack pieces out of my dead film idea, like hacking holes in a whale carcass for rheumatic health tourists to soak in.