Violet City: Fantasizing Liverpool in song, story and film

Abstract

Violet City exists as a sequence of songs, a fantasy novel and a micro-budget feature film. The film was shot entirely on green screen and is due for digital release in 2016. It uses hundreds of composited images and mattes, merging locations as disparate as the warehouses and streets of Liverpool with the canals of Venice, the Himalayas, the Liver Buildings and the Giant’s Causeway to create a dark fairy tale ambience. Airships and hot air balloons soar above paddle steamers and luxury barges in the shadow of Cathedral Mountain. I adapted the screenplay from my novel, written as part of my doctorate by practice, investigating the personal and cultural mythologies that informed my imagination, growing up in Liverpool, and filtered through the work of various pre-1980s fantasy writers. Mediadrome, an independent US publisher will be publishing the book to coincide with the film release, and I have provided much of the soundtrack, using recordings by my various Liverpool-based bands from the 1980s to the present. This article discusses ways in which these symbiotic creative works reimagine my home city through the lenses of fantasy fiction and how memories of Liverpool’s past landscapes have affected my creative processes over the years.