This weekend I will begin filming, and I have decided to start by shooting the end. I will be filming the scene in which Jael has finished her cake and is transported to her grave.
In this scene Jael finds herself in an open field sat at a table with the cake in the middle. In front of her are two tombstones one is hers and the other is of the man she killed. After much consideration I have decided that this man was her fiance and his name is John Sullivan, a good Irish Catholic name. Jael is forced to consume her cake in front of these graves as part of her punishment, it is a reminder that she was buried next to her abuser. I decided to add this to play into the conversation that I spoke of in an earlier blog post which is, the just nature of killing in self defense; should someone who has purposefully taken another person’s life for the sake of their own safety suffer consequences just as severe as a murderer.
Basically, what I’m getting at in all of this is that I have tombstones to make. Here’s how I made them.
I began my journey at Sam’s Club to look for empty cardboard boxes that I could cut and paint; I had thought of buying foam or wood to make the tombs, but in the end cardboard was the most easily accessible and most importantly the most free. Lucky for me the Corona Virus has left stores like Sam’s pretty empty so there was plenty of cardboard to choose from. I took from the first pile I saw and was in and out within 5 minutes with my two empty boxes of Halo oranges.
I came home and used a white wall paint I had in my garage and got to painting. My goal was to make them look sort of like marble.
Then I realized I had to figure out how to make the text on the tombstones appear as if it were chiseled out of marble. I spent my entire economics class trying to teach myself how to shade letters (I really get a whole lot of work done in that class, oops). After hours of scrolling through fonts online, trying to draw the letters by hand, and even inquiring with a friend who will be attending art school (causing her to question her career path), I came across a font I felt I could work with.
(the text conversation between my friend and I after I nearly caused her an existential crisis)
(The winning font)
When I printed them out I colored in the top letter with a black sharpie and proceeded to cut out each letter to try and give it the effect that the letters were carved out. I cut the boxes into some tombstone-like shapes and hot glued the letters onto the cardboard. I even gave John a middle name just to spice up the tombstone and because I had some extra letters. I’ve decided the extra A stands for Adam, John Adam Sullivan.
To be completely honest they’re not exactly what I had envisioned but I feel as though I could still make it work if in the short film I use them for comedic effect. Yes, these tombstones are supposed to look funky on purpose. It was an artistic choice, thank you very much.
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