Highrise is a short film which I feel deals with an individuals struggles of isolation and loneliness, as well as addressing the issue of post-natal depression, something a lot of first time mothers deal with. The film focuses on a young mother and her apparent contempt for her new born child. This is inferred rather than being explicitly presented through, for example, dialogue. In fact, this short film contains no actual spoken character interactions and no dialogue other than background television noise.
The director will likely have had to do some research into post natal depression as well as depression as a whole and developed ways to portray these emotions in a clever, implicit way. For example, there is a noticeable colour change when the mother leaves her child alone, possibly to die. We see a shift to a more blue scale colour, a colour which has strong connotations of calmness and relief.
Another technique I thought served the director's purpose really well was the lack of dialogue. This forces the audience to become more tuned into the films other goings on, such as body language, mise-en-scene and colour usage,
The use of colour, small setting and lack off dialogue all relate to the feelings of isolation and hopelessness that accompany depression/post natal depression.
Use of blue in "Highrise"
Post Two: A response to "Meat Factory Ear Worms" by Rishie Bernie
This audio only piece documents the experience of an Irish man, retrospectively recounting his time working a dead-end job at a local meat factory. The first thing I noticed upon an initial encounter with the piece was that although both the subject matter and story itself are not of huge interest to me, the use of audio really carried the narration and made for a really interesting experience. An undeniable key element of this work is storytelling, however music and sound effects also play a key part. For example, we hear a stark contrast of the music that the narrator remembers so clearly from his time at the factory, songs about love and songs with gentle melodies, juxtaposed strongly with the verbal imagery being portrayed. I think the author intended to recount a story, but one of pure human experience rather than one being told to entertain and make that story as visual as possible using only the medium of sound. The focus on the music he remembers is heavy, because its something everyone can relate to; "ear worms". The use of sound effects is interesting as it aids the verbal imagery greatly. There is a lot of use of sounds which are uncomfortable to listen to and harsh on the ears, such as knives being sharpened and machinery clunking. Although the sounds are not particularly haunting on their own, context gives them a harrowing edge. The piece is extremely successful in achieving the authors intent I believe. This is mainly due to how well sound has been used to create a strong and clear images in the listeners head.
Post Three: A response to "Om" By John Smith
Om is a short film which I liked largely for its focus on perception, and how an event can easily be warped by simple visual techniques which ultimately alter perception. The film is linear, taking place over a very short space of time (almost in real time). It is also very minimalist, with there being no particular set or props, simply one man, alone in a chair having his hair shaved. I believe this film is a personal view on how first impressions can be so deceiving. We have very little context to draw a story from, all we have is the visual and auditory information we are provided with upon viewing the film. The only dialogue is simply a monotone sound being made by the character having his head shaved, a continuous "Om". So, with very little information, we carve our perceptions of the event taking place based on what we do know; what we can see and hear. There is smoke rising from somewhere off camera, perhaps inscence? The man appears to be wearing an orange robe, the typical attire of a Buddhist monk. He is making the "Om" sound synonymous with meditation and Buddhist relaxation. The man is having his head shaved, the typical look of a Buddhist monk. It is not until the end that we realise our perception has be warped by jumping to conclusions. "Bordwell and Thompson Film Art" discusses the concept of associational form. Associational form is the connection the human brain makes when presented with little contextual information and seemingly unrelated objects. Our minds begin to search for a logical connection between the objects and we draw a conclusion from this. In the case of "Om", the aforementioned objects are connected by the viewer in a way that eventually turns out to be incorrect.
Post Four: Sound Recording
List of sounds used in our experimental piece:
"The Morning after":
- Ticking watch
- Tap dripping
- Phone Vibrating
- Alarm clock ringing
- Character getting out of bed to turn off alarm
- Knocking on door
- Cigarette rolling
- Sparking of a lighter
"The night before"
- Diagetic music (that our character can hear)
- Background chatter/conversation
Character in bathroom using cocaine (i.e bag being opened, drugs being poured out, credit card being used to make lines, loud sniffing noise)
Our strategy is to have the night before audio very vague. We want to have lots of noises together to give a sense of a larger space being occupied by more than one person. In the day after audio, the focus is much more on individual sounds, which would normally be lost and drowned out by the noise of general life. However, because of the night before, these smaller, seemingly insignificant sounds are magnified, and as we are using a first person perspective, they are also magnified to the listener.
Recording will commence on the 2nd of November 2015 between 17:00 and 20:00, and will be recorded in the order outlined above, all recorded on a Zoom H4N microphone.
Recording the sound of the credit card against the sink for the drug use scene
Recording the phone vibrating
Recording the cigarette rolling
Post Five: 6 Still Images Related to Our Piece
In our piece we are utilising a green filter over our light source. This is because green is synonymous with envy and jealousy, both of which are key themes in our piece. We also decided to never show our protagonist's face in order to create an air of mystery and enhance the first person element. We are experiencing life from his perspective and therefore never see him fully.
Sounds like the dripping tap, alarm clock, cigarette rolling and ticking watch, prominent in the morning after scenes in our piece, are singled out and appear louder to the listener, as we try to create an illusion of a much smaller, more claustrophobic sense of space.
A lot of our film will be filmed from a first person perspective. Here we see the equipment used to create this effect: a Go-Pro Hero 3+ and headstrap.
This image is vague but suggests a party or other such social event. This is because we want our audience to be a little confused about what exactly happen the night prior to the start of the film, using a flashback, non-linear narrative so that the audience pieces the story together at the same pace as the protagonist.
Post Six: The Finished Products
https://vimeo.com/148385164 - Film
https://soundcloud.com/johnrowbotham/john-and-bren-audi1o-project-first-draft - Audio Only
Post Seven: Evaluation
I think that overall our work turned out okay. I think our major problem was that we tried to be too narrative focused. I believe that this was because both my partner and I prefer films with a strong narrative focus. Also, we have not explored the experimental film genre in depth from a production perspective and therefore perhaps lost sight of the fact that the process was the most important thing.
We initially began with a storyline, which I think was our first mistake. Our idea was to experiment with non-linear narrative structure and flashback storytelling. I think that if we had perhaps at first focused more on the devices used to create the tone of the piece (which we did eventually do) and less on the final outcome, we would have been far more successful in creating an experimental film.
As the protagonist is recovering from a heavy night drinking, we wanted to emulate their level of confusion to disorient the audience along with them.
We recorded our individual sounds, first the "day after" portion, and then the "night before". I was in charge of creating the sounds while my partner recorded. After this, we edited our audio piece using Pro Tools. We boosted the audio on the "day after" sounds, as to the protagonist, these sounds would be particularly loud and irritating; sounds he had never perhaps noticed before were suddenly unavoidable and persistent. We also found that this changed the sense of space dynamic greatly. All the sounds were isolated and bare, making it hard to distinguish were exactly they were coming from, which we hoped to give the illusion of being directly in the protagonists head, amplifying a sense of loneliness. When we came to record, I had the Go-Pro attatched to my head for the first person scenes and therefore was essentially the actor. For the non-first person scenes, I was mainly in charge of cinematography and framing some shots, while my partner filmed and vice versa. The main issue we encountered was syncing the audio up with the video we were filming, as a strong narrative driven audio piece needed a lot of strong visual ques also. We got around this issue by having the audio playing out loud while we filmed, to give a rough idea of timings, and then did more fine tuning in the edit. This was another problem with attempting a clear narrative for this project and not being abstract enough with our sound. Upon a final viewing of our film, we realised that perhaps the story was not clear enough, and in future we should aim to explore more powerful methods of visual storytelling.
Throughout this project I have certainly learned the important of process focused film making. I have learned that there is more than one way to tell a story and that subtlety and abstraction is often a clever, more interesting way of getting an idea or theme across. I have also discovered how light, colour and sound can be used to tell a story and evoke emotion rather than through conventional methods.
Both my partner and I worked very closely throughout the process, we each had roles but were willing to help the other out where necessary. Teamwork was essential in this project to make sure we were both on the same page as regards themes and idea. We both allowed for creative input and tried each others' ideas out before dismissing them.
Experimenting with green light
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