During the preparation of his film Casa de Lava (1994), the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa compiled what he saw and what he read, his many ideas and pictures, into a scrapbook instead of a screenplay. Paintings, movie stills, letters, newspaper articles, scribbles, quotations from novels, postcards, lines of dialogue and snapshots guided him throughout the shooting and were carried on — and finished — after his return to Lisboa. This green covered notebook became an autonomous object, a visual record of Costa's way of thinking.