Ourselves a City By Sean Ripple www.flickr.com/photos/flatlife The filmmaker conceived the idea for his next project while standing in line waiting to pay admission to go up an elevator of the Eiffel Tower. It was to be a short-film that examined the confusion of language — the division of language by God as illustrated by the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. The film would use one long shot to showcase 3 duets taken from the middle point of their trajectory into an unknown location (filmed from an elevated perspective), giving the audience an unresolved effect, thereby creating confusion. The sense of mystery could pressure the individual involved in viewing the film to discern what the point of each conversation was. The 1st duet would be spiritually bankrupt businessmen who work for a very powerful investment company that is housed within the unknown location, representing the failure of religion to rehabilitate man. The 2nd duet would be two highly intelligent teenage boys bent on destroying the unknown location because of their hatred for the company that the spiritually bankrupt men work for, representing the failure of the soul's ability to work towards peace. The 3rd duet would be xenotransplantation research scientists who have just ended an affair, reviewing notes on a presentation they are about to give to the board of directors of the investment company the two spiritually bankrupt men work for, representing the body's failure to keep man happy. Although the filmmaker had a deliberate sense of what each conversation represented, he preferred the idea of obscuring so that confusion could birth an interactive interpretation of these archetypes. The film would end with a slow zoom out from the action, revealing the insignificance of all the interactions that had transpired. After the camera pulled wide, it would zoom out on an endlessly blue sky. After riding the second floor elevator up, the filmmaker reached the top of the tower and took in the “City of Light” like a breath, exhaling with a great feeling of privilege, for he understood that to construct worlds so effortlessly was a gift. He also felt privileged because he had a great financial force backing him and his ideas. He no longer had to struggle to bring green into his worlds; it came as Spring, fresh and unyielding. “Why?” he thought. “What boundary have I surpassed? What do I see? Is my responsibility greater than my ability to understand it?” In the vertigo of view and questions, a man asked the filmmaker for the time in French. "I don't understand" was the filmmaker's response.