I recently worked up a new opening--both text and video--for this novel. Click the image above to see the video, and here to see the text...

Although this is still a tentative opening, posting it now gives me an opportunity to look at it a bit more objectively. I am stll puzzling over this artistic form: a combination of live action and animation, made possible by our modern computers, playing off a text novel. I am hoping to create both--the movie, the novel--at the same time, though they require considerable difference in their execution. My expectation is that their differences will illuminate each other, and provide unexpected insights.

I have been a writer all my life, of course. I began writing little "books" when I was seven years old, which is more than sixty years ago. I thus have had plenty of time to experiment with the form of novels and stories, how words can be used in strange and distinctive ways. I take great pleasure in my verbal experiments, altering time, space, re-examining the nature of plot and narration. The question now facing me, however, is how to do the same experimentation with video. It helps that I have been a still photographer for 25 years, but the addition of sound and movement adds entirely new possibilities. These animations--I use Poser and Maya--allow enormous freedom. The camera can swing and swerve, people can fly, grow wings, landscapes and cityscapes can sprawl and twist around. How does one use these possibilities? One must not lose track of the main purpose here, to reveal truths, to tell a kind of story, to illuminate something about the human condition. How can one use all these visual and audio tricks to create something truly fascinating? I cannot say I have solved this problem, and--as in writing--I expect to simply experiment, keep trying new things: there is no single solution, only multiple possibilities. This short video, for instance, although it was a fine technical experiment--I am still learning to use these animation programs--lacks something. It is only an introduction, I understand. The "story" follows. But how else could I have put this intro together? How could I use these technical skills differently? I expect to brood over this, and return to this intro...make some changes, perhaps drastic changes...and post it again. We shall see.

Evidence of a Lost City will be my second multimedia novel, after the HAG, which I finished last year. It will be combine live action--using Jacqueline, of course, her daughters, and even myself--with animation. These modern computers offer amazing possibilities. I am creating "people" in Poser, a 3D software program, including a clone of Jacqueline, plus myself as a young man, an Oriental dentist, and a few--well, ladies of the night. They will interact with buildings and landscapes created in Maya 3D. This is a long and at times tedious process, but fascinating nonetheless. As the work progresses, I will post more segments here. Some will be simple experiments in form, which may or may not survive to the final draft (the "Dama de Barro" photos and video, for instance, were an excercise for Evidence). I imagine things, try them out, learn new tricks, try something different. I will also be using places I have actually built here--here in "this" world, I mean, in our home: my sculpture wall, for instance, and the garden with its adobe figures.

Evidence of a Lost City has grown out of my obsession with lost worlds, hidden worlds--a theme which has appeared in others of my novels: Orphe and Metropolis and Orifice, for instance (all still unpublished), and The Ethiopian Exhibition, and it is also the central theme of Kongo, a still-unfinished novel. However, Evidence carries the idea much further, and of course the computer allows me to use more than words to create these lost and hidden cities. I am myself quite curious to see what will emerge: for me, novels are organic creatures, and I never really control them. They take me wherever they wish to go. My job is to follow them--as well, and as bravely, as I can....

Some early videos that circle around the same theme include:

The Palace of Ungovernable Desire
The Red Dress (Beneath the City)
La Dama de Barro
El Rodeo de Media Noche
Hotel del Tiempo