During the past few months, my group and I undertook a creative projecting intending to create a short film. I had an idea during the early stages of creating a film that illustrated the differences between perception and reality from the perspective of a drug addict, but with the intention to make it more of a humorous piece than a social commentary, also coming up with the eventual location and suggesting the final costume idea in the process.
After the initial idea’s within the group were revealed, I was appointed director and took the lead in also writing the storyboard for the project (which was surprisingly difficult even without dialogue) I was also given the role of managing and co-ordinating the group after having initial difficulties getting in touch and synchronising our efforts.
The element I focused on in particular was cinematography, I chose this role as I had the best idea of how I wanted the film to be represented, so I assumed control of shooting the film as well as directing and managing the other members both on and off set, which proved to be quite difficult. I used a variety of methods of cinematography throughout the film. The majority of the film was shot from a distance, without much use of close up shots. This was essential for making the audience imagine they are onlookers to the situation, having an outside vision of the character, maintaining a distance. This was important in my opinion to create a sense of realism for the audience, as though they themselves were watching this happen at a park. I faced difficulty in finding a variety of different shots to use, the lack of dialogue limited my options as it closed off the opportunity for certain shots (such as over-the-shoulder)
I came fairly close to my expectations of the resulting footage, I managed to exceed them with certain parts of the film, including a shot of the protagonist climbing a tree that ended up having a much more humorous result than expected with the staggered, wonky zoom adding a sense of clumsiness to the shot that perfectly exemplified the content within it. However, my inexperience of cinematography shone through also, in several shots the top of the characters head are not in frame, resulting in very amateurish looking footage. Due to exceptional weather conditions, the tripod was also unable to be used as a result of thick mud and high winds, this meant that much of the footage had to be filmed hand-held and my lack of experience often resulted in a shaky shot. This meant I ended up filming everything several times in order to get the most steady footage. I do however believe that the footage, including the shots I'm critical of, contribute positively to achieving the aim of the film, realising it would have been entirely inappropriate if the footage was too smooth, the jagged nature of it appears to contribute to message of broken reality.
Cinematography was not the only micro-element I was involved in. I was hugely instrumental to the editing process, both as director and the person who created the idea. I was responsible for making sure the editing presented the right image so was supervising the editing in the early stages entirely, until the editors had the right idea of the eventual product we wanted to make. I used my experience of working with editing during my essay on the influence of micro-elements during ‘The Watchmen’ this experience helped when suggesting the specifics of overlapping editing and the passage of time. Also contributing to the minimal amount of SFX used in the project in order to make the film appear more raw.
This experience of analysing micro-elements was also used when discussing mise-en-scene. I had the idea of filming in the local park as I thought it would be the ideal location to implement comedy into the piece with the use of children's apparatus and the public feeling. I also had to consider the style i wanted the film to have. My experience analysing other films throughout this course i settled on a fairly light-hearted bright style, which although may not have came out quite as planned, the final piece went a long way to achieving this.
As the project progressed the idea changed, we soon discovered that some of idea's may have been too ambitious, such as someones vision of how the characters hallucinations would be presented. I took the unpopular decision to outright dismiss the use of green-screens in the film due to a lack of experience and the fact we were already behind schedule on the project. This meant the idea changed from an over-the-top obvious humour, to a more subtle one with a lot more focus on the concept of the film than on the special effects within the film.
