To get our creative juices flowing we arranged a group meeting 12:30 Friday afternoon, our self-imposed task was to inspect and get inspiration from existing one shot shot films from the Internet. We gathered ideas, plots, visual styles and shared our findings as a group. We all had different ideas, some stronger than others, my main idea was to create a cinema environment in a studio and have several seemingly random events occur distracting a young women from watching her film. I wanted to elaborate on this one shot film by Joe Swanberg:
I also looked at short films and long takes in existing films. Firstly Tom Yung Goong 2005, Prachya Pinkaew, although this isn't the greatest film in the world it has a fantastic long take on flights of stairs, whilst people are fighting and falling over the edge. I believe the long take creates a huge sense of unstoppable momentum and 'badness' which wouldn't work with conventional shots. You can't fault the cameraman, this scene truly inspires me to create long shots of my own.
Another long take that comes to mind is that of Goodfellas 1990, Martin Scorsese, where Ray Liotta and Lorraine walk through the Copacabana, the scene works perfectly in putting the audience in the point of view of Karen, who is on the verge of being caught up in a gangster lifestyle, It is truly an amazing scene and has a great sense of journey with mixed emotions. Who could resist the luxuries of a gangster-lifestyle? Especially with how this scene glorifies them.
We eventually concluded that we would use Oli's idea, showing a young girl chalking iconic symbols on the floor, the thought behind this idea was that pictures can tell story's without any dialogue or action, the audience would have to derive certain meaning from the symbols and pictures and relate them to the young girl's life. For example the image of a coffin would indicate she'd lost someone, the image of an A grade would show the importance of grades and so on and so forth. This would ultimately show the story of the characters life. We would later speed the sequence up to show a time-lapse. The main inspiration for this idea was a sequence we viewed in a seminar lighting documentary, showing a young girl drawing on the floor. This idea seemed to have a very memorable impact on everyone and thus inspired us to advance the principle further.
Now we had our final idea we decided to brainstorm any symbols, pictures and story developments that we could incorporate into our video, I went home and produced a collage of symbols and picture that might symbolise a young persons life. The main concerns I believed would be significant to a young child included: Bullying, Safety and Security, Money, Parents, Friends, General Happiness, Technology e.c.t. These ideas could all be developed into a story, for example drawing the divorce of her parents and how this made her feel, having her draw pictures like unhappy faces and tears to show how she dealt with the divorce. Continuing the story with a custody case depicted with pictures of a judge and hammer, eventually leading to her running away from home. The possibility's were endless. We all discussed what would work best and came to the conclusion about illustrating the journey of the girls parents splitting up, what emotions she felt and how she dealt with it.
Production to start soon...
Samuel Dobson
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