About this project

"The City of Love" is the last installment in a trilogy of work I have been involved with since 1999. The first two pieces, The Garden of Lost Things and The House of Weddings, took the form of audio CDs. This last installment will have several different forms.

The whole series is an examination of the human condition - love, loneliness, faith and the meaning of life. In the City of Love, the architypical characters represent the different aspects of our selves and present the story of what it means to reunite and integrate all of our different drives into one life.

As I write this piece I will be posting it in its very, very raw form so people can follow it as it evolves.

This is how I wrote "The Demon of Providence" and it proved not only to be beneficial to me as an artist, but surprised me in the way it created a momentary community of artists around the world who found inspiration and motivation from participating in helping with it. You can see the rough edit of the Demon at http://www.vimeo.com/6929525. I am currently finishing that short film (mostly sound and content cuts).

What I want to see with the City is the same kind of involvement plus to see its final presentation in a variety of media from a book to an audio CD (you can listen to samples of my audio work at http://www.reverbnation.com/cassandratribe), to a straight reading of the work, to a stage piece and a episodic video release.

I need help with getting the working draft together. Monetary help. Nothing major because I already own all of my equipment and such, but I want to be able to incorporate the project into some other online environments that I have (such as radio broadcasts, web sites, MP3 distributions, pdf downloads etc) to increase people's exposure and involvement with the content development. First I have to upgrade the accounts to handle the size of the materials, then I have to begin to generate the media, publicize it and cover incidental costs (such as broadband charges for uploading and proof order costs for printed material, submission fees to festivals etc. for finishing funds).

All of this will bring me to finishing the working version and from there I will begin to record, shoot and edit the final version. My goal is to have a working draft by this fall and the final versions out by Summer of 2011. My dream goal is to pull a Miley Cyrus and get a limited digital release of the full film version in cities around the world. But that is a whole other concept.

You can see other samples of my video work at http://www.youtube.com/cassandratribe, including Requiem for a God which was just featured in the Herning International Film Festival.

I am maintaining a project development page on my home site, http://www.loveandwords.com. The direct link to that page (which has the Synop, Outline, Rough material and notes) is http://loveandwords.com/city/city_of_love_1.html.

So that is the basic pitch.

Here is the short and dirty version of:

The City of Love

There is a woman who wakes up on the sands of a beach just outside the walled city of Love. She cannot remember anything about who she is or how she came to be there. She is unaware of the fact that she is War.

The Ocean, in passing, sees her standing there and falls in love. But he cannot speak to her because he has no human form. So he goes to God and asks him to make a human form so he can speak through it to the woman. God goes into the garden of lost things and selects bits and pieces from lives that people have forgotten or lost and builds the Ocean a man and sets him on a raft so the Ocean can bring the man close enough to the woman that they can speak.

Inadvertently (purposefully??), God has chosen to build a man for the Ocean out of this woman's forgotten life.

As the woman struggles to remember who she is she is faced with a choice, does she take back who she was or does she become someone new?

In the city, the Demon Hope rules for Love has long lain mad far beneath the city in her lair, only as the Auslander approaches on a Black Horse in the sky, does Love begin to dream and wake.

The Auslander is racing Azuras, who is dancing on the mountain ridge and drawing near, and all of this is coinciding with the celebration of the simultaneous death of the oldest man and the birth of the newest.

He brings with him a woman who is blind, who holds the key to returning the world to Life.

And they all collide, lit by the flames of the feast as Love wakens and remembers why madness possessed her, the betrayal and death of her lover, Peace at the hands of War.