While preparing his film Casa de Lava (1994), the Portuguese director assembled what he was seeing and reading, and his many ideas and pictures, into an album rather than a screenplay. Paintings, film stills, letters, newspaper cuttings, scribbles, quotations from novels, postcards, lines of dialogue, snapshots: all of it guided him through the shoot, and he went on with the album, and finished it, after returning to Lisbon. The green-covered notebook became an object in its own right.