This studio is titled Experiment. Screen. Sensation, a clear indication of what this semester was about. Foremost, the ‘screen’ aspect of this studio is communicated quite clearly through the two projects I made, One Closed Door and The Bridge Jump. And while this is an obligatory objective of the studio to achieve, it was quite difficult in doing so, due to the fact that this semester was structured like a “bootcamp”, according to our studio leader James. In most other classes I have only completed 1 major film over the semester, so it is therefore ecstatic to reflect back on the work that was done.
The other key concern of this studio was ‘experimentation’, with the whole class granted the luxury to create whatever we wanted. What helped us to open our minds and achieve this was the filmmakers we learnt about each week and the way they used the short film medium to express a single idea or create an alternative world for the audience to experience. Chris Marker’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge had such similar ideas to my film, The Bridge Jump, and gave me an array of visual concepts to put in my own film. Unfortunately, my film wasn’t played in the cinema screening due to the fact that we were meant to put our film in the Exhibition folder on our google drive, however, I did so on the day of the screening at 1pm in the afternoon which was too late. All was well though because I was just proud that the project was completed and viewed by my classmates anyway, and I still had my other film One Closed Door screened.
Seeing this film played on the big screen was genuinely breathtaking. The cinema experience is like none-other because it is communal, where everyone in a dark room is away from distraction of the outside world, and becomes fully sucked into this realm of the film. When it is on a big screen as well the film is viewed differently. For example, the start of the film has these close up shots of different clocks ticking. When viewed on a laptop it looks kind of cool with how it was edited, but in a cinema the clocks are huge and staring at them with the fully immersive soundscape becomes hypnotic, and the intensity that we tried to achieve for our horror-type genre was actually achieved.
If I was going to continue to work on this film with the intention of entering it into a film festival (something my group and I are actually looking into), then I would probably want to work a little bit more on the editing. One of the toughest challenges we faced with this film was lighting, learning in class from James that to produce shadows we first needed to create a lot of light and then work to cancel it out. With none of us being lighting experts we were very much experimenting on the day. Once we got into post production we saw the mistakes and was able to fix the majority of it in the colour grade, however, I want to go back and have more darker and consistent tones of blue throughout, for some of the lighting is too bright and dark in different places.
Other films that really inspired me from this class was Morph by Lili Callisto and The Last Time by Adam Lee. For me, these two really grasped the experimentation concept as they made their films in alternative ways like none other in our class. Adam’s use of vignettes to create his short and Lili’s whole avant garde concept about masculinity, body and water created films out of this world that I could never see myself making. I like narrative structure, and I learnt early on in this semester to let that go because you can’t cram a 120 minute plot into 5 minutes. I admire how these two were able to grasp this concept so well.
Being apart of a cinema screening like this was great. The turnout was bigger than I had anticipated and when all our projects played together it became a proper event. It seemed as if we had a good hour of content shown, so I feel as if the audience were given a night out. Moreover, to see my name appear in big letters on the screen as a director was a special feeling. It sounds pretentious for me to say, but it’s how I truly feel, and moreover, it’s inspired me to want to create content and share it for the world to see. If I can give people visual experiences of life from my own perspective then I believe that’s a good enough purpose to be here.