fourthyearproject2

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Visual inspo - Vivienne Sassen Tiki pointed me and Beth in the direction of this photographer, who is just fantastic. She creates such strong compositions through simple means and plays with light and form… 

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Group MOOD Board 

Here is a link to the mood board/visual inspo page I posted through during development and the run up to shooting, it’s a bit abbreviated as I took all of the images off the original Facebook group, omitting 15%… and many other specific posts from other team members…  This should serve as a good example of the kind of imagery I was trying to throw at people to get them in a certain mindset… 

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Here are the mood boards for reference that Beth and I agreed upon and discussed in much depth... 

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Edit Notes 2

In many ways, I think I managed to get the cut to that plateau stage, where I could make it better over an indefinite period of time... but that ‘better-ness’ would only be registered by myself, as the film seemed to ‘work’ well, both in structure and pace...  It’s always hard to tell when to stop...as I could go on editing forever... it got to the point where I could spend at least 30 minutes looking at one cut in particular and it’s timing... and then of course the next day I look at the way it was before and like that better than whatever I thought I was doing over that extended period of time staring at it.

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Edit Notes 1

Got some feedback from Paul upon seeing a cut. His feedback was mainly to do with the ending having slightly different pace, but what he was arguing for was a version/idea of the scene that had perhaps been in the script, but had changed slightly upon shooting, through rehearsing and so on... He thought the final scene was really about the main character Sam, getting wise to this Cosmic Being and his empty absolutisms… which in a way it is… except what comes across much more in her performance and delivery is a sense of being lost, and not being helped by the Being, vs. getting tired of it and dis-regarding it…  The scene did need some playing with and in the end I removed a handful of lines, both of Sam and the Being, and one extra one from the Being, making her look to him without him responding, which draws out her desperations/sense of being lost and forces her to speak again… 

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Inspiration Here is a cracking short film, an imagining of Joyce and Beckett getting together to play a round of pitch and putt… of course Beckett is waiting for someone who isn’t coming… (Waiting for Godot Ref.)  There is something so simple about it, which leads it to be so accomplished visually and in setting. Exciting and inspirational to see something so simple done so well and with such craft! 

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INSPIRATION: The Simpsons. There is a great blog/instagram feed, called Scenic Simpsons, which are stills from the show of moments before characters enter/leave the frame and they have a very odd melancholy about them. It takes the portrait/cartoonish-ness of the show and turns it into an Edward Hopper or Patrick Caulfield painting…  There is something very lovely about the clear absences and depths to the images. 

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Second Day of Shooting

We shot today.  So today was harder (intentionally) than the first, as it required dialogue specific blocking, which then required specific camera co-ordination.  One of the most challenging things was faking an angle of a top shot (from an attic), except we wanted it to be a shot for a different part of the scene/different spacial geography... but couldn’t get this angle without an attic to have the camera in...  So some time was spent agonising and taking a shot on a phone and flipping it on different axis’s in a computer, until we figured out that it would work as long as we swapped the hand the actress was carrying a prop in and changed her hair and clothing to the opposite side...  These things always get you muddled.  It was harder work but good stuff, think we got some really nice moments, as well as some quite interesting shots.  It’s a funny thing directing, I feel like I have so so much to learn. But shooting through film and being forced to be clear with decisions both for camera and acting makes things become easier in the long run. I’m finally getting the discipline that I lacked on Bathtub since we kept going for more and more takes (which always got increasingly worse in terms of acting, for a minute boost in the technical flourish). Obviously the former is the important thing. 

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First Day of Shooting

We began shooting today. It’s funny how much you learn and how much things you have in your mind visually go from being something both vague and fluid into something concrete and specific.  Italo Calvino once wrote that the key difference between cinema and writing (film vs. books) was that in literature the word and the image are separate, whereas in cinema the word and the image are the same. The words and language and techniques employed in writing create an image that readers design themselves, whereas in cinema everything is literal, form and image and word are all one and are done specifically and for definite, concretely.  I suppose another thing to add is whatever you have in your mind before you shoot is bound to change when you have to do it and things as simple as real life physics, and the logic of reality and space mean that things often change. A shot we had very clearly in mind was one high angle of Sam (Tiki) leaning over a pizza box, in the top right corner of frame- seeing her bent over in full from the side, getting both her body and legs and feet (floor in shot) and the pizza box (floor) and the surrounding area just being a rug/carpet in my living room...  As it turns out to achieve this shot, the carpet (rug) would have had to be possibly 2 1/2 times the size it was (whether stretched or just extended in pattern) to accommodate the whims of that composition...  Again, it was great shooting on 16mm, seem to have done just under a reel today which is what we thought we would be shooting, hopefully we can keep it up! 

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Shooting on 16mm

We shot the first part of the film (a fake film that the main character is watching in the bigger film). Although it was a brief shooting day, I feel like I learned so much by engaging with the process and discipline that comes with the shooting on film.  Since you have to make sure everything is right twice, in every departments and do many dry runs and rehearsals, for acting, action, blocking with camera, light etc. It forces you to focus on what is important and what you really really need to get out of the take, as you only want to do 2 or 3. 

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Finding Inspirations in odd places on youtube.

I was watching a recent video from the Cinemassacre channel (An older youtube channel, which features the series of the Angry Video Game Nerd, early quality internet stuff). The main guy called James was reviewing Power Rangers, and talking mainly about how he had never really watched it as a kid… but on reflection wished he had, as he was at his friends after its initial boom and a fight scene from the show was on, and all of his pals were laughing and making fun of the men in rubber suits fighting each other… Which James thought was amazing and a long time fan of Godzilla movies and the similar genres…  While tracing the DNA of the show he came across the fact the first series used the fight scenes recycled from a pre-existing Japanese series that existed on a suspiciously similar premise to Power Rangers... Upon finding this out, he tied its roots all the way back to the visual effects designer behind the original Godzilla… Looking at some of the now cheesy and campy effects (but all in camera/in studio/made and tangible) have something really loveable about them I may borrow… 

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Location Scout with Production Designer.

Sarah and I headed to my house last week to do a little scout/recce.  It was useful for both of us to be in the space and discuss things and shots, which then allows for discussion about props and dressing needed to build up the surrounding world Sam (the main character) inhibits.  Also, while there, a few moments and ideas came up, such as adding more details to the phone call scene, like a poster of ‘far away’ where Sam dreams of but will never go. We then watched Secrets and Lies as research, in-directly that is. It’s so great, it holds up excellently! 

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Moonlight

I went to see Moonlight, last night.  It blew me away, the film is incredible. It gets to something very universal and human, through being so specific and building its own world and portrait of the lead character. It’s great to see such a tender cinematic film, that actually represents black lives in the same manner as Polish people are in the films of Kieślowski, instead of having the same tired safe cliches and stereotypes that usually manifest in mainstream U.S. cinema.  The film was truly one about the moments between conversations, and it had a subtle poetry that was extremely welcome and moving. 

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Dialogue chat and discussion with Tiki

Met up with Tiki earlier to talk a bit about the character, dialogue and the film in general.  We talked about how the brother who phones up should, to a degree be trying to fit her mentally within a box, as he conforms to a certain type of expectation in finding employment and therefore ‘success’ in life…  We discussed the idea that she as a character embodies how black and white people are about values, expectations and what it means to be ‘successful’.  What we came down to was that people always want easy answers to things, or have fairly simplified terms and apply them to life in order to quickly and (mis-)accurately make sense of things… But of course, there are ‘no right answers’ so to speak, and there isn’t one answer that will satisfy everyone in the larger question of what am I doing here?  The answer she comes to by herself, is egged on, in-directly by the cosmic being and it’s truisms.  A lack of an answer, can in itself be an answer… which is something I’m very interested in but also something that I think relates not only to graduates worried about the future, mainly due to social pressures about what they should have achieved and where they should be, but something that I think affects everyone multiple times through life, it could be a feeling you get when you turn 30, or 50 for that matter… any time you hit something deemed as a milestone by society that then has a loaded nature of what you should be and have achieved by that marker point.

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T2: Trainspotting & Mark Kermode

I went to see T2: Trainspotting yesterday, and went to see it again today. On second viewing I liked it much more than I did on the first time, also having thought about it in the interim between viewing 1 & 2, I reflected upon it and why I thought it was good…  I suppose it has very different concerns to the first film and has a much more melancholic edge, which I really like, and is more focussed on the realisation of ageing and the passage of time.  Another thing that I really think is worth mentioning and discussing is that it is a film with a style and a vision, which to some degree is something I see less and less in cinema, especially juxtaposed to all the films from the past I pick out to watch.   In a review of the film Mark Kermode discussed that Danny Boyle fits into a tradition of British cinema that goes from Powell & Pressburger to Ken Russel to Nic Roeg, and films that have a visionary and fantastical edge which create visual images that transcend just a gritty story…  That was in a sense inspiring, since in a sense many of the shots and camera angles in T2 where just done through fairly simple and occasionally quite messy lighting, and simple but bold camera angles, big cuts and large angles at the right time…