Our Experimental Film

We decided to change the direction of our film slightly, keeping the theme of seeing what is going on inside the protagonist's head but this time round physically showing what is going on in his head as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his partner. We changed the influence of the film to a poem that Will had found and thought it would be good to base the film around. We show the protagonist in a slightly messed up narrative either having flashbacks or hallucinations about his former partner and I think this is done quite effectively as we spent a long time making sure it cut well. He does not speak during the whole film as he is alone so we cut out any sounds in the world and decided to make the whole of the sound available to the audience either what he was heading in his head or a low musical ambient that we created in garageband. The music in the background is very slow and slightly dark, we thought this went well with the style of film we was trying to create. We got the person playing the dead partner to read out the poem into a rifle microphone and then modified the sound we collected in soundtrack pro by adding reverb and taking away some of the dryness from the audio creating a sort of angelic or mystical voice which turned out even better than any of us expected in our head. Sections of the poem appear strategically during the film. My favourite shot of the film is probably after the protagonist pours some vodka into a mug instead of making tea and then on the wide shot we blurred the focus while he was in the room as if he was drunk and then reapplied the focus when he left as we thought this would be a good way of engaging the audience making them feel like the protagonist feels. We had a few problems with the playback once we got the footage back onto the mac's and this meant we had to do things in the edit that we did not want to do and leave small sections out but I do not think this affected the film overall and in that case we got lucky. If I was to redo this project I would probably have made a few more ideas rather than deciding too quickly what I wanted to do before bouncing a few ideas around and getting a true solid idea/vision of the film I wanted to make. I do think that I may have rushed into a decision due to being worried about the time contraints and not being able to fit everything into the deadline. Looking at the finished film I do actually quite like it and I believe it is a visible improvement on my last film especially with things such as exposure as we took time before every shot to make sure the exposure was how we wanted it to look.