With this assignment, I stood by my trend of interpreting the words and the various meanings we attach to them with our ever shifting language. It’s a strange methodology I go through when given a prompt in that I immediately go straight to thinking about ways I can bend the rules and in a way not do the prompt but at the same time technically fulfil the criteria in a way. To elaborate on this i’m going to use my two examples for Hurt & Joy and evaluate my thinking process but also examine my Portrait and Repeated Dialogue exercises as well.

 

Throughout the semester so far we’ve been shown some examples of auteur experimental filmmaking, two of these short films having been created by a great A-list celebrity director when they were in college. “The Big Shave” (1967, Scorsese) and “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This” (1963, Scorsese) paves the way in showcasing accessible experimental film while conveying complex themes such as the self-mutilation of the American dream and extreme obsession. Without recognising it, visually I took inspiration from “The Big Shave” (1967, Scorsese) however I feel that the sketch I made was mostly hollow and devoid of substance, but given the criteria, it didn’t need to be anything more than that. The short sketch in where the character scratches oneself until they bleed before reaching any relief doesn’t offer itself much up to interpretation, but it does showcase both pain and joy. When given those prompts I broke down how the two relate and unrelate and came up with four themes. Masochism, sadism, schadenfreude and self-deprecation. Originally I wanted to portray self-deprecation and schadenfreude by recreating in my living room a Rodney Dangerfield interview with Johnny Carson where after Dangerfield completes his five minute set and sits down next to Johnny, confesses to the audience he’s depressed and is met with with a roar of laughter. It’s an amazing performance and I felt maybe imitation of that would have been an interesting experiment as taken out of that context and placed in another more barren and uncomfortable, if that same reaction would seem incredibly out of place, or rather how out of place given the imitation. But due to the logistics of it all I quickly abandoned that school of thought and eventually reached the scratching the itch gag and a play on words “No Pain No Gain”, the latter being the harder one to film due to scheduling conflicts which resulted in a very last minute change.

 

During the planning and filming of this assignment I also caught glandular fever, leaving me extremely fatigued and in pain halting a lot of my productiveness. It was upsetting to me because I was unable to follow through with plans of things I wanted to film and furthermore my pitch. However a silver lining in this is that in a sort of lucid state, a cutscene from a video game stood out to me more in how the visual was carrying me almost. “What Remains of Edith Finch” (2017, Giant Sparrow) develops this scene of a kid Calvin swinging high on a cliff hoping to go around the tree. The way the film follows a point of view perspective creates the same feeling of adrenaline you’d feel as a kid on a swing as well, it’s almost hypnotic. Thus, this played into my idea of capturing portrait as a dive into different environments, hoping that the momentum through the point of view perspective would create some feeling in the viewer that while not hypnotic, at the very least relaxing. Furthermore the idea of diving into a picture could have also come Scorsese’s “What’s a Pretty Girl Like You Doing In a Place Like This” (1963, Scorsese) however both his short film’s were not active influences, but given the fever, it’s difficult for me to say what was actively being taken as an inspiration.

 

Lastly there isn’t too much to dissect with the repeated word exercise beyond the homage to “Airplane!” (1980, David & Jerry Zucker) and its parody of the “picked a wrong week to quit” trope. I shot this sketch like the others on an iphone with an accompanying tripod which unfortunately only record vertically and due to the independent nature of filming these sketches, I could not adjust zoom in or out as the camera does not allow that tool when switching the iphone camera to face forwards. With this limitation I chose to shoot in the same angle with the same rhythm hoping that the repetition of the language would also translate in the film language and create a level of comedy or deeper meaning within that. Of course i’m not a particularly great actor and if I had the extra help of an actor, i’m sure i’d have been able to set up a shot that would not look as jarring as it was.

 

Overall while these exercises are not perfect, I understand that they were experiments with the equipment on hand and the limitations of said equipment. While some limitations were actively restrictive, other did come down to the user. For example with portrait I shot some of the scenes on a Canon DSLR which died after filming twice, furthermore the charger for the battery was misplaced so I could not charge it. I tried using our other Canon camera, however it was strictly a photography camera and therefore its charger and battery couldn’t also be transferred to the other camera meaning I had to shoot on my iphone given the little time left to book or borrow a camera. Hopefully moving forward I am resolved to at least have proper contingencies in the event of a last minute change of plans.

(ASSESSMENT TASK 2 VIDEO) 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EVMd0dIp9calNPfFzZ1pi2_sBrz7cH8H

 

 

References: 

• The Big Shave. (1967). [film] Directed by M. Scorsese. United States: Martin Scorsese.
• What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This. (1963). [film] Directed by M. Scorsese. United States: Martin Scorsese.
• Ian Dallas, 2017. What Remains of Edith Finch. Giant Sparrow
• Airplane!. (1980). [film] Directed by D. Zucker, J. Zucker and J. Abrahams. United States: Paramount Studios.