Name: Nora Graham

DXVA Short Essay (Treatment)

Working Title: A Young Woman’s Cacophony

Key Characters: Girl

Who: Girl, skeleton, bride

What: Bones, lace, lips, needles, eyes, dolls, paper airplanes, hands, desks, drawings,
etc.

Where: In a dream-like world

When: No set time period

Why:

Topic #1: Utopia

Include: Girl looking in mirror at her body and smiling, a dark figure within a meadow
with flowers, two people talking, blue sky with clouds,

Not Include:

Topic #2: Emotions

Include: Birds flying, a dark ocean, butterflies, meat, traffic lights, buildings, desks

Not Include:

Topic #3: Trans Experience

Include: Lace covering my face and body (metaphor for dysphoria), thermometer
making my body hot (turning red), gears (metaphor for body becoming something)
Not Include:

Topic #4: Collage

Include: Dada-ism type of art, Surrealist art

Not Include:

Using the research you performed on your film, create a short essay by writing about each of
your research topics. Your essay should be at least 3-5 paragraphs long:

Remember: This is your documentary/experimental film, thus the questions you research
should be exciting to you! If it is not exciting or engaging to you, then it will not be engaging
to us, as the audience.

Alternative: If your film is very personal in nature and does not require any research, then
you will write a 3-5 paragraph personal essay on your film.

Research or Personal Essay:

I plan to experiment with surrealist art, my emotions, my experience being trans, and
the idea of Utopia through the art of collage animation. The art form I will be using will
express my pure creativity, not limited by my drawing ability or any other factors. My
experimental film will be using aspects of dada-ism, an art movement started in
Switzerland after World War I.

The first topic I would like to touch on in my film is the idea of a Utopia. What would be
everybody’s ideal utopia? Would it be possible for everyone in the world to live in
peace? Or would there always be an inevitable outlier to this peace? I want parts of my
film to touch on this, to talk about the kind of utopia in which there is someone that
may be unhappy in a “perfect world”.

The second topic that I’d like to express in my film is my emotions. My despair, my joy,
the hope I feel, my anxiety, all of my strong emotions that I feel, I want to express them.
I’ve felt that for a while, I haven’t been able to fully express my emotions through
drawing due to my current skill level, but I feel that with the medium I will be using for
my film, I will be able to express everything that I am feeling.

The third topic that I’d like to touch on in my film is that of my trans experience. It’s
hard saying anything that hasn’t already been said on being trans, but as it’s important
to me, I’d still like to express my feelings about being trans through my film. I have a
few scenes in mind to express how being trans has affected me. One of these scenes
being a body being covered in lace. This is a metaphor for my dysphoria, and for the
lengths I’ve gone to hide my body from myself and others due to it.
The fourth topic that I’d like to include is simply my excitement towards the world of
collage art. While researching artistic motifs and movements for my film, I discovered
Dada-ism as well as surrealist art. I’d like to combine these two and create my film
based off of these aesthetics. I’m very excited and motivated by seeing collage art, as it
is such a unique style of art that I can never quite compare anything else to it. I hope
that the end result of my film will show how truly excited I was to make something like
it, and I hope the audience will become inspired by my film.

These are additional notes for my purposes only:

The following scenes will be a part of my experimentation:

- A skeleton taking pictures of people, turning them into skeletons

- Girl sitting at a tv showing a skeleton head
- Girl walking with an eyed cloud following her
- Bride with a bouquet of roses as her body is shaking
- Girl sitting on moon with rabbits
- Skeleton falling from the sky
- Girl looking at her body and smiling
- Lace covering the girls face and body
- Body turning red with thermometer next to her
- Gears turning in girl’s body, as well as butterflies
- Smiling lips falling down into a whirlpool