When I set out to create these short films I had a vague idea of what I was to do. The element of being able to decide on what I could and could not make solely relied on my will to create within specific time frames. As you can see throughout these films, I created a couple of them with the help of my high school friend who goes to Swinburne. In other cases, it being myself or with the help of my sister to aid with certain elements

of production.With every video I placed emphasis on certain elements, for instance the hurt video which illustrates the usage of heavy colorization to suggest a certain theme.  Each sketch has a inspiration from a filmmaker within it.

The Portrait video is heavily inspired off of cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema, and to an extent the photography of Rinko Kawauchi (http://rinkokawauchi.com/en/). The emphasis on cinematography is complimented by the fact that I used a DSLR camera. It’s essentially a interview documentary with long takes and a emphasis on scene and mise-en-scene. The shots that start and end the piece ( the dark unfocused shots) are of influence of these photographers. Moreover, the mood of the piece is complemented the jovial conversation/thought track, which also has a really toned down audio piece which is later revealed after the end of the film. In this sense I wanted to achieve a mystery and extremity aspect of the video to make it avant-garde whilst keeping to the structured interview, documentary style and behind the scenes shots. All in all, the main purpose of trial and experimentation here was cinematography as I believe its my weakest aspect of film-making

Whilst the Dialogue sketch is shorter than the others, I feel as if its the one that’s most well executed. It definitely takes its roots from Darren Aronofsky’s Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky is potentially a filmmaker I’d like to invest time into studying and understanding the content of his films (also he’s one of my favorite filmmakers). The sound design in particular was somewhat of a mistake that actually added to the experimental aspect of the short. I did not connect my microphone properly to my laptop the for the first take of the inner monologue and it came out all glitched. I decided to keep it in case I could somehow work it into the sketch. It worked out brilliantly. The glitches matched some of the cuts and added suspenseful aura to it. Further more, it masked some of the inner monologue I had recorded properly, therefore, making some of the words feel unrecognizable but some very recognizable (the profanic and some of the louder words) In turn it created a amazing sensation – and all of this in a 25 second video.

Joy, is to say the least, the sketch I spent the least amount of time on. It was more of a comic relief like video if anything else. It just combined most of the things I liked. To me being goofy and enjoying myself is what brings that sense of joy, so that’s how I approached this short. In a way its very stylistically in the same vein as a lot of Youtubers that I watch… I decided to create a new version after I saw this video :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JqzEpg0j-0. By a Youtuber that I watch regularly. I felt inspired by how he projected his memories of joy with his significant other before they split up. So I decided to get my family’s DSLR and replicate the same. To look back on the past, and the good memories you create with others and by yourself captured in a still shot is a moving element that I wanted to capture. To make it more original I added my seeming-less impressionist long shots with a dissolve blur opacity effect on the shot of the DSLR and I thought it turned out great.

Hurt, needs work on the sound design~ stylistically it is reminiscent of films such as Perfect Blue and Requiem for a Dream (those being my core inspirations for it anyways) – I feel as though it has a Lychian-esque vibe to it though. I subscribe to the aspect of “dreaming” in which the late Japanese avant-garde animator Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Paprika) represents in his films. The color palette is highly suggest of this, the dream-like oranges that is. Also somewhat of a homage is that its the same colorization and lighting as Mima’s room in Perfect Blue. At the time of writing this I still am working on the sound design elements of it. I was originally going to base the sound design off of the sound in Perfect Blue. In particular the vocalization that creates a eerie sensation when listening to it :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhfS6O4Sksw. I attempted to create a vocal acapella similar to it however it didn’t produce the same effect as the choir vocals. Instead I chose to record some eerie ‘world’ sounds to match the appeal of the isolation within the short. Instead I decided to leave the original diagetic sound in as I felt the silence complimented the overall aura of the video.

Impressionism is something I’d like to explore further in collaboration with some of my shorts, I also love really long shots especially in Haneke’s film Amour there’s a boatload of unsettling long takes. I know of the likes of Claude Monet, so I’ll look into some of the aspects of his work and try to relate that into a film-making sense. I also recently saw Shoplifters by Hirokazu Koreda and was moved by the way the film portrayed the characters stories.