Cloudstreet Commentary

I have decided to start this by selecting a piece of content – a text that will generate a process of adaptation. Tim Winton’s novel “Cloudstreet” is a modern saga based in Perth, Australia. I plan to use only the opening and closing chapters as my content/script. It is an amalgam of everything I love in a novel, “A fragmented, hilarious, crude mystical soap opera…one of Winton’s great gifts is his ability to combine reality with a dash of wild poetic fantasy. In a rich Australian idiom, Winton lets his characters rip against an evocation of Perth so intense you can smell it.”

It is a wonderful site of enquiry to investigate how written language can be transposed into a typgographic language for the screen. I plan to move from micro to macro – first creating visual studies that explore the texture and nuance of Winton’s words and phrasing. Beyond that, I will work towards conveying a more overall sense of the world of the novel – the character, the place, and the tone.

These early letterpress type studies are the beginning of my attempt to use create a rich and expressive typographic language. I am playing with evoking the water motif that is so central to the whole novel, and this passage in particular. Moving in and out of legibility will create a sense of focus/defocus - a sense of sound behind the language.