Monomania

 By Louis Larkin, Holland Stanway, Ingrid Han Bao and Luca Jennings

Monomania is a short film revolving around themes of insecurity, infidelity and the inability for a young couple to be open with each other. The film concerns Ophelia and Eli, a young couple who’s relationship appears to be on the rocks. Ophelia notices a couple of small, out of the ordinary actions which prompts her to quickly spiral into a pit of believing he is cheating on her. As Ophelia beings to stalk Eli and try to find answers, she loses him. Just when she thinks it’s all over and she’s lost her boyfriend for good, she arrives home to see a candlelit dinner made by Eli for their anniversary, an event that Ophelia had forgotten about.

Throughout this production process, communication was a key part of our success. We were able to complete our overall idea and be ready with our filming and production very early on. This meant that there were no real issues in our group as we were able to delegate tasks with more than enough time to complete them. We also had plenty of time to organise editing sessions as a group so that we were all able to share visual ideas and settle any issues we had with certain scenes. Our main focus in the story was to have as much of the “show don’t tell” aspect in our storyline. So we had to be careful to make sure our dialogue didn’t give anything away. We also had an internal and external monologue which we took inspiration from the 2014 film “Gone Girl”. This helped add to the dialogue in the story as without it, there was little to no talking at all.

Personally, I learnt a lot about being able to set shots up and work to a timeframe. We had outdoor and indoor filming as well as sunset/night time filming. So it was important to not leave everything too late as we would essentially just be wasting time and probably would’ve had to come back to film another day. However, our whole group worked really well and it was so much easier than past groups i’ve been in the past and we were able to be almost ahead of schedule with a lot of our filming. Something I will definitely try to recreate with future groups.