Initially, my idea was to do a review in the style of JonTron or Egoraptor, who do reviews of games in a fast-paced manner that balance insight and analysis of the things they review with sudden angry outbursts, random and nonsensical ways of wording things, and what is referred to as the 'rage cut', made popular in the webseries Plinkett Reviews created by RedLetterMedia, where a person speaking is saying something but is cut off mid-syllable as the video cuts to something entirely different, often involving someone yelling angrily or describing an embarrassing or incriminating act they've committed before cutting to them continuing the review as if nothing has happened. Here are some clips to show the style I was aiming for, and to better understand what a 'rage cut' is and its comedic potential (something which isn't very evident in a dry text description of what happens), you can see examples of it in the third link at 05:42, 05:51 and 05:56:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY7sMsgyuJw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l69BP1uhlMs&t=12m38s (relevant clip ends 13:16)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM&t=5m28s (relevant clip ends 06:00)
There was also some influence from the (currently) two Halloweenie shorts created by Phelous, which has a similar style of heavy use of 'rage cutting' and general intentionally bad pace and timing. These, combined with the two YouTube stars described above, were the kinds of videos I was attempting to recreate with my video.
http://phelous.com/node/1423
http://phelous.com/node/1426
And on top of that, there's also the above-mentioned Plinkett Reviews, whose intentionally boring delivery, strange behaviour and tendency to veer into bizarre and often disturbing tangents was another big influence on how I intended to deliver my lines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJarz7BYnHA#t=2m42s (relevant clip ends 03:20)
So, I decided to create a video in the style of the above videos, but with the added twist that since I wouldn't be able to use copyrighted content, I would have to not do the video in the same way as the above examples with video footage interspersed with clips of the thing being reviewed. Initially this was going to be offset by the fact that I would be playing a nameless character I've played twice before, who is a masked being that says very strange things and is implied to be some sort of supernatural creature, but that plan was scrapped when I discovered the tenet of Dogme95 regarding camerawork meant the camera had to be strapped to my hand at all times, and couldn't be left on a surface while I gave a performance in front of the camera. With the entire video now having to take place in PoV, it would simplify matters far more to just forget the masked man and just play an all-new character.
However, since I'm notorious for leaving things to the last minute, although I had a rough outline of what to do and some ideas for individual gags, I didn't have any plans more detailed than that when I began shooting the night before what I thought was the deadline (a week before the hand-in, before I found out others were shooting their films as late as the following weekend). What follows are the only images from the shoot that will ever be released, as while there is a breath in my body I will ensure the rest of the rushes go unseen by anyone but me until the end of time.
I shot a small amount of footage, the entirety of the introductory monologue (first three images) and some of the segment acted out with toys with me performing the voices off-screen which would have made up the bulk of the film (the rest of the images). However, as filming progressed it became more and more clear to me that the film wasn't going to work. Just like editing, writing and drawing, acting is something anyone can become competent enough at if they work hard and long enough practicing. However, while I've spent a good many years writing and editing, and have been working hard at improving my drawing skills over the past two years, I'm a very quiet person and thus have not spent the same amount of time training and building up my voice to be of sufficient emotive standard to be able to give the performance I have visualised in my head.
Or, to put it another way, my acting sucks and thus trying to do the silly voices the influences I mentioned above do ended up being ear-splittingly awful. On top of that, I intentionally didn't script anything, not even having any idea where the thing was going to go beyond a few scattered lines and skits here and there, assuming my attempts to improvise would only add to the intended tone of poor delivery, sudden cutting and random humour. In practice though, what I meant to come out like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6IJXBZ9EE&t=9m3s
...just ended up looking like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRXmmpHvssU&t=9s
So not long into shooting I decided this wasn't going to work and abandoned the concept, leaving me at 7pm the night before the day that (I thought) was the deadline with no idea and nothing but whatever was lying around to improvise a totally new film with. And that's exactly what I did.
Thus, I embarked on what I call a "Ninth Doctor Brainstorm", so called for a scene in Doctor Who in which Christopher Eccleston's Doctor figures out the identity of the alien threat by having the other characters point out what they know for sure about the creatures, each time responding with the phrase "narrows it down!", and I see building an idea from nothing to be the similar process, seeing what is available and doable within the set constraints, each new item "narrowing it down".
Being night-time by this point, obviously the film would have to take place at night. Narrows it down. There was only person who would work on the film: me. Narrows it down. All I had in terms of location was my house, the streets around my house, and the park nearby. Narrows it down.
With those criteria narrowing it down, the first thing that sprang to mind was the freeware video game Slender, which has become something of a cult internet hit. It's based around the supernatural creature Slenderman, whose appearance and background mythology was collectively created by anyone who wished to add to the mythos of the creature and whose additions were agreed upon to be good enough by peers to make 'canon'. Thus Slenderman is the same kind of mythological creature as those of folklore, created not by one person but by a synthesis of many, many different interpretations and retellings which come together to create one cohesive mythos. The Slenderman of this game, as is the case with many creatures of his ilk, varies slightly from versions of the creature seen in other works, acting in a similar way to the Weeping Angels in that although he chases you as you play, he can only move when you aren't looking at him, but with the twist that the longer you look at him, the more sanity you lose, losing sanity faster the closer he is to you when you see him, and when your mind is utterly gone, you lose the game. It can be downloaded free and legally from the creators' website here.
Of course, with only me there I couldn't have someone to play the Slenderman, and I had to keep it within the brief of centering the film around the concept of 'the ending of a relationship'. I struggled for a while to work the idea around that, before realising the answer was obvious: although most of the film would imply something supernatural, in the end it would be revealed to be a ruse by the main character's girlfriend, not only working in the idea of ending relationships but also complying with the Dogme95 tenet stating that genre films are outlawed.
Thus, within half an hour of scrapping the previous idea, I had a solid idea of what I was now going to do, had scrawled some images on pieces of paper that I would plant in the woods and then 'find' (as the core objective of Slender is to find as many pages of scrawled warnings about the Slenderman as possible before the creature kills you, with the Slenderman getting harder and harder to avoid the more pages you pick up), and headed out to shoot.
Shooting was fast and efficient. I knew that in editing I would be trimming the shots down to bare minimum, jumping around a lot from shot to shot to keep the pace fast enough so as not to bore the audience, so I was free to capture as much coverage as I wanted of whatever I wanted to give me plenty to work with in post-production. Apart from the essential shots I needed to tell the story, basically the opening shot mimicking the opening of the game minus the text credits and all the shots of discovering the pages, all the shots I took were improvised as I explored the location. In particular, realising how creepy an empty playground in the middle of the night can be meant when I came across it I worked the third page into the location, establishing that nothing is present on the zip-line in one shot, and then returning to it a moment later with the page appearing out of nowhere. I also came across a strange formation of trees in which a semi-circle of trees surrounded a short stump, which looked ominous and felt like it was some kind of place of witchcraft when lit only with a single torchlight. By chance, the bus drove past me as I was walking home, and the road was long enough that I had sufficient warning to get the camera ready to shoot it going by, and as it turned out it worked well as a sort of calming influence, contrasting with the supernatural and oppressive atmosphere of the woods and sort of reassuring the audience that outside of the woods, things are back to some semblance of reality, before hitting them with the twist at the end. I shot the final scene an hour or so later after I had recovered from wandering through the woods in the middle of a freezing night, and while I didn't notice the the incredible disarray the room was in, since it's like that 24/7 anyway, I did notice it in post-production, and thought it added to the twist to have the house look like it was ransacked in addition to the girlfriend taking the main character's money. After filming brief bursts of playing Slender for the opening sequence and about thirty seconds' worth of actual gameplay, whistling the whole time, filming was complete.
Editing was a brief process, due mostly to the simplicity of the process, since there was nothing to do other than trim and order shots; no transitions, no titles, no audio work other than decreasing the volume on the bus shot since its engine was far too loud raw, and no colour correction. There were mixed reactions to the rough cut of the opening few shots and some scattered raw footage. While Kellen liked it, he felt that there should be more characterisation of the PoV character outside of the ending, as he thought simply seeing someone wander around the woods at night would be boring. I did see where he was coming from, but in the end I ignored his advice, since I felt that adding shots to add to the character would have spoiled the mood and atmosphere, and (in my mind at least) those two elements are the driving force in the film for almost the entire duration. This decision was bolstered when Lucy saw some footage and praised the mood it gave off even in brief, unedited clips.
Annoyingly, because I intended to do the bulk of editing at home, I hadn't bothered with moving the Premiere project to the Local Workstore, but then forgot to get a copy of the project file before leaving the edit suite, and thus lost it after turning it off. It always frustrates me whenever I have to re-edit something, since unless there's very little time before a deadline I work at something until I'm happy with it, and losing that work and having to do it over usually leaves me wondering whether what I did the second time around was as good as I got it the first time around. However, within an hour or two editing was complete.
During the editing process, appropriately enough, I was feeling my way through the film like I was stumbling around in the dark, finding the appropriate pace of cuts and deciding which shots to use where as I went along. Apart from the main plot points, namely the three pages and the end, it was up in the air what would make it into the final cut and where. Some shots I liked but had to be cut because they either slowed the pace too much or didn't fit in smoothly enough anywhere included an atmospheric shot of a streetlamp almost completely engulfed by trees that then tilted and panned to see a lit porch of a house in the distance, the shot of the tree circle I mentioned a while back (which had to be cut since it wasn't clear enough with just one small spotlight illuminating the shot that it was a near-perfect semi-circle of trees around a stump), and some shots of walking from one area of the woods to another through a housing estate, with the lights from the streetlamps creating interesting flare effects in the lens and bathing the street in an orange cast that looked great.
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| Although I captured several shots of travelling from one section of the woods to another, it made more sense to cut them out and instead imply that both parts of the woods are one, to make the film feel more cohesive and less segmented. |
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| I loved this shot, thought it added greatly to the atmosphere... |
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| ...but sadly had to cut it when it became clear there was nowhere in the film that I could slot it in without it being awkward and unnatural. |
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| You can see the stump, but you can't see the semi-circle of trees around it, so it's just a stump. Not a very threatening stump either. |
One nice, unintentional bit of continuity that I only noticed in editing was that a cat was standing near the light, watching me, in the opening shot, and then when I find a page there's the sound of a cat yowling in the distance. This was pure serendipity, the cat just happened to be hanging around when I shot that take of the opening shot, and due to the large number of pets present in the area around my house, dogs barking at one another and catfights are common, and a catfight just happened to occur as I was filming; although one thing that occurred while the camera was off was a bird flapping around in the trees. I doubt had I caught that on camera it would have been that scary or effective, but it sure as hell succeeded in making me jump out of my skin.
The only other major change in editing was excising my only line, spoken after discovering the girlfriend's note: "Well, I guess there's only one thing to do." Although I left it in initially, I ultimately cut it out after listening to it several times, and deciding I still wasn't happy with my acting ability. The film works fine enough without it, it still got the desired reaction from the crowd during the screening.
Speaking of which, the screening went better than I was expecting. The title of the film wasn't displayed in the menu used to play all the films, and thus added to the surprise of being related to Slender, which was not lost on as many people as I was expecting, since it turned out a sizable amount of people had played the game and thus got the reference. Although the laugh at the end twist wasn't as big as I hoped, it was a positive reaction nonetheless, several people praising it and even continuing to discuss the film after it had ended. On the other hand, that last point may have been down to a combination of taking a break in screenings after my film and the fact that it was a homage to Slender, which got people discussing the game rather than my work. However, I still view that as a win for me, since stirring discussion that is only tangentially related to your work among the viewers is still better than stirring none.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with Slenderfan for what it is. I think what I came out with under the circumstances was far better than it had any right to be, and it stood out well from the other films created for the module. It won't go down as one of my all-time favourite creations, but it's far from my biggest embarrassment either. Whether that means it's a mediocre thing that I'll barely remember making a year from now or just a film that sits in the spot on the spectrum of quality that's a quiet middle ground between astounding excellence and abysmal failure remains to be seen.
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