Experimental Film- Initial Idea

When considering all the inspirations I have stated below we came up with a reasonably strong initial idea within our first group meeting. We have decided to focus on a character who is psychologically unstable due to his obsessive behaviour. This was a good idea as the character is unstable therefore if we look at the world in his own point of view there will be no narrative and no true reality in the film. It is this loss of reality that we are going to display to the audience to be able to interpret his behaviour by what is going on in the shots we take.

We are trying to make this a unique film. We are going to use tight close shots to show the claustrophobic feeling that the character has and combine this with quick paced cutting in editing to The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo trailer as this gives the sense of the thoughts rushing through the characters head, constantly changing due to his obsessive behaviour. In the editing we are also going to add implicit images throughout that at first will just flicker in the editing to confuse the audience but then as the story progresses they will understand these underlying images.

The music we hope to achieve will be similar to that of Intervals by Peter Greenaway as the beat he uses that is syncronised to the cutting of the shots is a powerful tool in creating order, something that we want to exagerate in our film. The fact that Greenaway also uses different sound on each sequence is effective in providing different interpretations of the same sequence. We want to do this to allow the audience to recognise the psychologically fractured mind of our character as to get some sense of meaning from this short film.

We also plan to use black and white for the entire film as this will deepen the sense of darkness within the character. He has demons as his mind is controlling him yet he is fighting to control it. This will really show in the scene we have decided on where he argues with himself in the mirror. This theme of control and order will run throughout and with black and white the duality in the film will be further exaggereated.

The shots we plan to use in our short film will all be constructed as checkerboard and parallel to most of the things we are focusing on. This will be explained in more detail in the shot list blog post.

Finally we are able to have multiple camera set ups in this film as both myself and Tom have Canon 550D DSLR's. Therefore we will have more choice and better continuity in post production. We can also have a wider range of shot angles and cutaways. Furthermore sound is also going to be controlled and we aim to use a minimum amount when shooting and dub the narration in post production.

The downside of this project is the amount of time we have to complete it. This is our first project with both Camera and sound yet we have the shortest amount of time to finalise it. This may effect the overall quality of our shoot and edit. However we aim to create as strong of a short film as we can.