THE PRODUCTION
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
— From “The Road Less Traveled” by Robert Frost
“Etude in Black” is not just a story about a young and beautiful piano virtuoso, it is about the choices we all face in life, about what we do when our heart says one thing and our head says another. How do we choose between our passion for art and our need for love? It is about the decisions we did not make and our fantasies of how our lives would have been different had we taken another direction — the road less traveled.
The writer-director of this project, in his own life, had to choose between art and commerce, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the lure of big money and the freedom of creative expression. And one always wonders, “What would have happened had I gone the other way?”
As our lead character, Alana, enters into an other-worldly state to perform publicly, her instrument becomes as much a protagonist as the actress playing it. To create a compelling experience of visual music, we will take apart a piano and use a snorkel camera to bring the audience inside the instrument. Please take a look at the clip from our wonderful Director of Photography Robert Primes's “Theo Plays Chopin” for a glimpse of some of the visual techniques that will be utilized in “Etude in Black.”
