I've kept meaning to start this blog for a long time now, but for various reasons have only now got around to posting. For Film Arts Fundamentals 2 (FnD2), the film I will be creating is currently untitled, since I'm not very good with titles anyway. But let us start from the beginning.
The creative journey here began with a double screening of La jetée and the American remake Twelve Monkeys. Although I won't give a full review for both, since I don't have a strong enough opinion on either to do so, I imagine I would have had a better opinion of the latter if I hadn't seen the source material first. As a sci-fi fan, I found the concept brilliant, and would have enjoyed how the American version presented it were I not constantly comparing it to the original. Then again, I spent the entirety of La jetée trying to keep up on what was going on since the narration was so unnecessarily florid and obtuse, so some simplification in the presentation was welcome nonetheless.
After that, I began to brainstorm ideas for the film I would create for the module. One of the first ideas that I latched onto was a return of a character I had created for the Interview Project in the first term. The idea for that film was that since everyone else would be talking about themselves, and thus have moderately interesting variations on the same theme, I wanted to buck the system and play a mentally deranged character for the piece. I was always unhappy with the performance I gave, I didn't rehearse my lines as much as I should have and I was in the process of coming down with a cold during filming, so it always came off as awkward to me. I thought, then, that I should have one more go at the character to see if there's anything to be done with him.
The thing that solidified the concept was a short discussion with Dan, where he revealed that although it was required to shoot stills on a 7D or equivalent for the film, it wasn't required for every image. With the idea that some of the images could be created through other means, I remembered perhaps the most successful sequence in the Interview Project film, in which the camera panned over a series of nightmarish images the character had drawn, which drew a big laugh during the screening. Now armed with the concept of a part-photographic, part-drawn film, I moved on to hammering out a concept that would work within this template.
I knew that anything to do with the character should be unnerving without explicitly showing anything creepy, as in the original when the character was simply sat in a chair talking, but the things he talked about had disturbing connotations, since he would describe something odd and then leave out the important answer to the question 'why?', leaving it to the audience's imagination to fill in the blanks, which leads to some disconcerting implications. Thus came the idea of having the photographed segments be 'real life', all filmed from a POV perspective, and as the character narrates a story it transitions to the drawn segments as it becomes more fantastical. The film begins light and fluffy, but as it progresses becomes darker as the implication is that the drawn segments are the character's sanitized and fantastical accounts of very dark events, culminating in the final shot. This last shot will be the single moving image required by the brief, and will be the only shot to show the narrator himself, showing him turning towards camera with an unnatural glow in his eyes, implying that there is supernatural elements at work here.
The principle inspiration for this approach is the webseries Marble Hornets (the first episode of which is here, and the series can be followed by clicking the 'Next' link below each video). In this series, a filmmaker is stalked by a supernatural force which manifests as a humanoid figure with stretched limbs wearing a business suit known as the Slenderman. The idea of this unknowable and indefinable force stalking you is one of the few pieces of media to genuinely scare me in recent years, and Episode 26 in particular is one of my favourites despite being constructed around one of my most hated elements of film, the jump scare. It is the true mark of craftsmanship when a filmmaker can take a cliche so worn, tired and despised and make it one of my personal highlights of the series. Even though my film will be told from the supernatural force's perspective, even going so far as to include first person narration from it, it's my hope to capture even a fraction of the feel that Marble Hornets can achieve. It's an interesting goal, in my opinion, since that way of telling the story has the potential to take away much of the anonymity and mystery around such a character, and that is one of the principle ways such characters gain power and generate fear. It's like remaking Jaws, but telling the story from the shark's perspective. Can it be done? Well, at the end of this module, we'll find out.
Today, I'll be nailing down the story once and for all. My plan at this point is for the character to tell a series of short stories rather than one continuous narrative, each one slowly getting more and more unnerving. Now, though, I need to decide on the order of the stories, how each one will play out, and then write the narration in full. After that, this week I'll be recording sound effects and the narration, since the slide-show format means syncing audio created separately from the visuals is far easier to do, as well as drawing the drawn segments, with shooting the photographic segments at the weekend. In the next post, hopefully due to appear in the next few days, I'll discuss the work done on the story as well as posting tests for the drawn segments.
See, there's both a creative and a practical quandary with this aspect. I have the option of either drawing the images on paper and scanning them, or creating them with my iPad using the app 'Noteshelf' and uploading them to Dropbox as an image file or a PDF. The next post should hopefully have test images and a discussion on why I decided on one production medium over another.
Until then.
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