From the assignments  Joost Grootens formulated when starting his workshop, Loes and I chose to do a visual index of a book. We picked Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’ , a surealistic play Pinter wrote in the 1960’s. It features a family of 5 men  plus one woman, wife to one of the men. Set in the family’s living room, the play focuses on 24 hours in the life of the family where the happy couple – who live in the States – come home and make a lot of ripples into the already unquiet family pond. Lots of stuff going on under water, too.

To be able to analyse and index the play it was essential that we had a digital copy. As it is copyrighted material, no such copies exist on the ‘net, so we decided to do one ourselves. After one day of hard grind, we had all of the text in a Word file. Then the fun part started – sorting, counting, adding, editing. We split the play into an Evening, Night, Morning, Midday, Afternoon  and Evening part and analysed speech patterns for each of the six roles. Never knew this, but people don’t talk the same in the morning as in the evening (found that out by counting the number of rhetorical questions –  none in the morning, a lot in the evening).

Then we visualised our material making an index for each time period, an index which we put in the back of the book. We put in a couple of nice devices for thumbing through the book and the index, and made it look like it all had been in from the beginning. Which worked great!  Loes was really good at getting the right kind of typeface and the right kind of paper. She also knew how to operate Indesign, a tool I had not met with before.

Joost really liked our work. And ‘praise from Sir Hubert is praise indeed….”.

We also did a little video with fingers playing the parts of the family members. Fun to do – apart from the shit that happened when going from one video format to another – but it wasn’t as good as the index in the book. Glad we tried, though. I will want to do more video, it has its possibilities.