EYE OF ROUND

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SPOILER-FREE SYNOPSIS

A man looks at a woman.

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY (SPOILERS!) by Diego Kontarovsky

Eye of Round was the first of my four Directing I projects.  The prompt was to make an MOS short (that means no sound) that shows a moment, and it should be no longer than 2 minutes.  I thought this was a very limited amount of time, so I figured I should start with something extremely simple.  A man and a woman establishing eye contact.  But that would be too boring.  Naturally, I decided to have this man make eye contact by looking around the planet at a woman sitting behind him.  Whether or not I succeeded at showing this was up for debate as of the in-class screening.

Andrew Kenneth Gay (B.A.) is listed as the assistant director, but that's really just my ignorance about credits.  His role in this was much closer to producer.  It was his idea to actually go inside the eye, which was way better than my original idea of running the camera through several fields and streets and then speeding up the footage, as if we were circumnavigating the globe ourselves.  The horizon we see in the eye was computer-animated by Dastoli Digital.  It looked really amazing when they showed me the raw horizon footage on their computer.  It was all these different CGI terrains, spanning day and night, flying past at a million miles a second.  It was really beautiful.  You can barely see it in the eye, though.

The fact that we see the man behind the woman, but not the woman behind the man was done intentionally.  I wanted to leave it open for audience interpretation as to whether or not this was being imagined by the man, since we do, after all, go into his eye.  It's a metaphor for every man who looks, in a sense, all across the world, for the ideal woman.

"Nessun Dorma" was very deliberately chosen as the song, because it perfectly vocalizes the main character's desire.  It's an aria from a Giacomo Puccini joint called "Turandot," wherein a prince sings to a princess who is in her room at night.  He talks about a secret he has that no one shall know, because he's going to speak it on her mouth (put that one together, kiddies).  And that at daybreak, he will conquer.
 

EYE OF ROUND     2004 / Running Time: 3 minutes. Written, Directed, & Edited by     Diego Kontarovsky Assistant Director     Andrew Kenneth Gay, B.A. Directors of Photography     James Dastoli     Robert Dastoli Starring     Drew Lindo as Man     Christina Rubenstein as Woman

Visual Effects & Animation     Dastoli Digital Color Timers     James Dastoli     Robert Dastoli Production Assistant     Justin Lader "Nessun Dorma"     Written by Giacomo Puccini     Performed by Luciano Pavarotti Special Thanks     Panera Bread

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