Brian Doom:

• Director
• Writer (intertitles)
• Producer

Plot Summary

Milo loves his paintings, but hates selling them. His wife Maureen thinks he’s going to be the Next Big Thing, if only he can get the right opportunity. An opportunity like meeting Geraldine.

Geraldine loves art. Especially art by dead artists. Some people make art; Geraldine makes dead artists.

Background

“The Artist” was produced as our submission to Round 4 of Scary Cow, and is intended to be the first ten minutes of a hypothetical feature movie. Originally, I was going for a 1940′s flavor with some modern elements.

However, when Jennifer Griffin and I were editing the piece, we remarked on the strong performances of the actors– I had directed them towards a melodramatic flavor to seem more “period.” Their facial expressions were so evocative that we realized the visuals of the film could stand on their own, even without dialog. So, we contacted Little Man T (at http://lil-t.com/) who whipped us up a stellar “silent movie” soundtrack.

About the Art Deco-themed intertitles: sometimes you will see movies with intertitles for nearly every line; not here you’ll notice. I always preferred the less-frequent titles as seen in Pandora’s Box: just enough information to help you figure out the story; but for the most part the narrative is carried by the performers. The audience is required to pay a little more attention to the plot, and to deduce what is happening. I feel that this involves the viewer more than the “AND DEN DA CAR BLOWED UP!!!1!!@!” style of spell-everything-out Hollywood releases.