There’s a new work in the pipeline this week! It’s based around the book we spoke about last week, House of Leaves. The basic plot of the book is that a character is in search of a new apartment and in the new apartment finds an academic study of a documentary film called The Navidson Record but can’t find any other evidence of the film existing. Just to recap, within the fictional world of the book there is a report about a documentary – several layers of fiction. The only way we (the reader) are able to access the book is through the narrators interpretation of the report – we’re not even presented with the actual document, only through the lens of the book and its characters. The work which has been inspired by this is making a DVD menu for the documentary spoken about in the book, The Navidson Record. For those of you born in the 21st century, a DVD menu is the bit when you put the DVD into the TV and you have a few options such as scene selection, play movie or special features. DVD menus strike us as interesting because they’re kind of like a blurb for a book or a lobby area of office building. They’re not as informative as a trailer because you’ve already bought the DVD so they don’t need to sell it to you anymore. This goes along with the idea that the film is inaccessible other than through the narrators’ interpretation, just as here it’s only accessible through the imagery we’ve chosen for the menu. In addition to this, the imagery for the film will all be taken from YouTube clips of people attempting to make trailers for The Navidson Record, creating another layer of interpretation.
The work will be shown on a TV screen at average eye height and below it will be a rack of DVDs which share the same imagery at the film above. The DVD’s will be able to be taken by the public and on them will every fan-made film we could find on YouTube of a Navidson Record’s trailer, some of which we have used in the menu film itself. They will all retain their own titles meaning that they could be found on YouTube if people wished. This in intended to reference the idea of physical distribution as well as the distribution of ideas and access to content; physical being DVDs are old, inefficient tech, most laptops don’t even have CD drives anymore, and ideas being about how the film from the book is presented to a new audience. DVDs are they’re their own “thing” now, they’re becoming a snap shot of tech and time and could eventually be ironic/nostalgic in the same way records are.
The font in the book changes throughout; the changes serve as a way for the reader to quickly determine which of its multiple narrators’ work they are currently following. In the book, there are four fonts utilized by the four narrators. These are: Times New Roman (Zampanò), Courier (Johnny), Bookman (The Editors), and Dante (Johnny's mother). Therefore, we’ve chosen to use Times New Roman for the font in the film since Zampanò is the author of The Navidson Record.