The Babylon Project

Conception of Idea: The video diaries started as an idea for Professor Quinby’s Apocalypse: Before And After course.  We had to do some kind of Apocalypse-related creative project.

I originally started with the idea of a multi-media project, and that became too complicated. I decided on video diaries, and due to time and production constraints, I focused on one character instead of the original two I had in mind.

I wrote the scripts from the perspective of Sara, an 18-year-old high school student that I felt would have an interesting place to experience the other side of the Apocalyptic belief – a topic we discuss in class is how often Apocalyptic belief can lead to violence and I wanted to explore what it would be like to witness the intense evangelical belief, given away to violence.

Time: I decided to set the piece in the future rather than an alternate reality because I felt it gave the piece more credibility. However, this had a slight drawback in that I had to choose sets that I felt were kind of ambiguous in location. By 2057, would rooms, walls, and outdoors still look the same? This is all questionable. However, I considered that this was about forty years in the future, and some kinds of outdoors and “old” setting would remain, especially in rural Oklahoma.

Space:  I chose Oklahoma because I was inspired by “Jesus Camp,” a documentary set in rural/suburban Missouri. I thought that by choosing a location where religious fundamentalism seems to be the norm, I get to explore a character’s “personal apocalypse.” I didn’t have a way to recreate a genuine Apocalypse, so I thought this was a good way to get to write a character-driven, futuristic story and attempt to film it.

Filming Process: I originally shot the entire thing on a Canon ZR80 in about three hours. However, all of that footage was compromised. Those were shot at the Macaulay Honors College and at Central Park.  After losing all of that footage,  I ended up shooting it on a small VADO HD for the first diary, and my iPhone 4S for the last two, which were shot at Brooklyn College. There was the downside of the campus and less tree cover, but it was the best attempt at recreating the original footage with the time-frame of 24 hours that I had.

Character: I figured that since my classmates would be seeing me perform, it would distance myself from the character to do a Southern accent, which I knew how to do but altered to be based on a recording of an Oklahoman woman. I didn’t have much in the way of costumes, so I enjoyed using accent and make-up as a way to explore character.