The eden's edge project

Laboratory 04: Office for Narrative Landscape Design (ONLSD).

The winners of the Grand Prix in the Labo section of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2016 Gerhar Treml and Leo Calice, part of the collective Office for Narrative Landscape Design (ONLSD), will direct a workshop about landscape, narrative and cinema.

What if the natures of landscape were narrative? What would they be about? How could we identify them and apply them as means of design?

Our workshop's goal is to question the separation of film and reality as we focus on their inseparable narrative nature allowing us to explore and renegotiate the many worlds we live in with techniques of film.

The Eden's Edge Project explores the powerful impact popular culture has on the way we see and use our landscapes. In doing so we focus on film as one of its most influential media and examine how narrative strategies can utilize filmmaking as means of landscape interpretation. In the workshop we shall show how this approach can be exemplarily applied as we step inside the production process of Eden's Edge and reinterpret the Californian desert as one of Hollywood's most prominent landscape icons by the life-stories of its actual people.

We shall start by listening to an original interview with a desert resident and examine its narrative topography in a transcript analysis based on Mikhail Bakhtin's insights into how stories appropriate and produce space. Exercises shall exemplify this method and allow us to create desert interpretations from the interview footage. The results will include sketches and ideas for potential film based landscape designs (storyscapes). In a final presentation we will show how we realized our script-based designs for Eden's Edge in a hand-made film studio centered around a few basic conceptual ideas.

Gerhard Treml and Leo Calice