Experimental Films: Fiction Adaptation

We were all given the chance to have a an experimental shoot with all of the equipment. The end result was planned to be 2 to 3 minutes and was to have the overall theme of our choosing. As my own final project will be about somebody trying to communicate with someone who isn't fully there with little success, I chose to revolve my experimental film around the feeling of despair.

When it came to filming, I wanted to use some of the techniques and experimental shots that I had tried out previously during the first day of fiction adaptation. The most noticeable is the shots that crash zooms onto on elf my character's face.

The set-up was one character, standing, looking at another who was sat on a chair. The character on the chair has a distant look and is paying no attention to the person stood in front of him, almost as if he isn't even there. For this part, I used a two-shot of the person stood up looking at the his friend while the other is looking off to the distance. I zoom this out very slightly which is something I hope to use in my film, though I should use a tripod then as I just used hand-held here and it wasn't as stable as I'd have liked.

Other experimental shots of note included where certain shots that are starting to turn upside-down, symbolising how the character's life is turning up-side down. Another shot which I tried extensively to perfect during the test shoots was used where I would crash zoom onto a character's face. I feel theses shots worked to great effect.

During the editing process, I found that I had to prolong a few shots as the film would only have lasted just under the required length of two minutes otherwise. The result of this meant that sometimes the duration of the shots felt too long.

I decided not to use any of the captured sound and instead tried to create my own sound-scape. As with the last few projects, I decided to create my own music (though this was not very developed and was a rushed job). However, I feel that the subtle piano worked well to reflect the theme of despair. I even repeated one of the piano pieces but added reverb to create a more horror themed aesthetic. Other sounds were taken from the site, 'Free-sound'. These included the sounds of wind to reflect on the emptiness of the character's mind as well as sounds that emphasise the movement of the camera.

A certain sound effect was that of the sound of bees. I had previously listened to a song by Pink Floyd called 'Hey You'. the song is about somebody whose mind is slowly eroding. It is described in the song as 'The worms got into his brain'. The sound of the worms, however, resembles the sound of bees which had the effect of moving between ear to ear, feeling like it was trying to get into the listener's head. I tried to emulate this.

Here is the final video: