Ink

Artist’s Statement:

My work is titled Ink, and it tells the story of an office worker running out of ink unexpectedly while in his office doing tasks. To satisfy his boss (and not get fired), he must embark through an absurd “journey” to do whatever it takes to complete his job, while also find his missing ink.

This work came to me in a dream. No, literally. I was bored one day, and I decided to take a long nap. While it, I had a sort of surreal vibe behind it and it reminded me of Twin Peaks, which was I wanted to aim for in a previous idea. I wanted this screenplay to feel vast and empty, and express absurdity (because I like it!). Additionally, I am very inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when I read it for my high school’s theatre class, and the aspects of absurdity I think really shines through in my script as a result. 

One of the things I always wanted to capture was a feeling of vastness, like the feeling you’d get being stranded on the middle of the Pacific with nothing but the raft you’re standing upon. This “vastness” is found in the headmaster’s office, where it is a dark, empty room that stretches for miles with no source of light but the one peculiarly shining the headmaster’s desk. 

For the hallway, I was thinking more something contradictory to the open office. Rather than wide and large, the hallway is cramped, tight, and short. I wanted a more claustrophobic effect for the hallway, just to expand more on the surreal setting of the story. 

Of course, the characters are human, but I wanted their behaviors and personality be uncanny, which I felt would add more to the absurdity. Interactions between characters should feel inhuman, as if I’m talking to a brick wall or an AI that has no idea what I am talking about. Their motives and the actions that are done as a result of those motives have to be unexpected to what is the social norm. 

After hearing and seeing a bunch of feedback from my peers and Shelley during my workshop, I’ve gotten more of a hold of how I want to branch my story further. For the ending, I feel like it would be best for me if I stuck to the end goal being finding his ink. That is very absurd as the “challenges” Casper goes through are ironically terrifying for such a trivial task. 

Another thing that I wanted to really encapsulate is the great amount of tension that the audience experiences during the plot of the story. Obviously, there is little to no emotional stake in Casper’s challenge to find the ink, so I figured a better way to get chills in the audience’s spine is through the visceral display of craziness that occurs within the confines of my story’s world. The absence of noise, the claustrophobic-inducing hallway, and the mystery of what lies beyond the doors—all the uncanny properties that I can use to really give the audience a thrill when reading this script.

As for the length of my screenplay, since the goal is so trivial, I figured it would be best for me to keep it to a short film’s length. If I ever conjure up more ideas to extend it to a feature film, maybe I can come back to this one someday.

Thank you for reading!

Jose Lorenzo Mendez