1st Year Final Film: Film Brief, Inspiration and Goals
I was given a difficult topic during a difficult time.
“Optimism”.
What does that mean to me?
I found myself pondering over ideas for weeks on end.
What is the silver lining around my cloud? What makes every
day worth living?
It was bad enough that the entire country was in lockdown due
to COVID, then there was my mother’s illness, she was 5 weeks into her regular
chemotherapy sessions that seem to have no end. Despite all this, I still
looked around for optimism in my life for the sake of my degree at least. Then I lost both my grandparents to covid, in the span of 24 hours they both left for the afterlife.
The idea kind of hit me as my deadlines were approaching and I was swallowed in grief. 2020 and 2021 were the years where so many of us lost loved ones. Funerals were extremely lonely and extra painful, many of us could not even see our loved ones for the last time due to the risk of contracting the virus from their lifeless bodies. My mother kept mentioning her disbelief and that she constantly thought her parents were just sitting at home.
My short follows my take on grief, loosely around its 5
stages and although it seem like the opposite of optimism, but we forget that
in grief, we tend to desperately grasp onto every small bit of happiness and
find optimism in the little things until it becomes a little less painful for
you to wake up every morning. Essentially, it is impossible to work through
your grief without optimism. They are both interlinked.
Whether it is sitting together with your loved ones on the
night of the tragedy and soothing each other’s wounds by reminiscing on funny
stories or whether its locking yourself in your room to get some time to
breathe and try to come to terms with everything, whether its finishing a
painting that you started when times were bad but better than right now or
watching toddlers run around the house and cause chaos that distracts you and
leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. Repeating the same song more than
15 times because its all you can stand to listen to.
Then slowly, the repetition of every single day, when you
start adding one more action back into your day, when you no longer cry at the
very thought of the people you’re mourning and instead of recalling it as a
tragedy, you think “How nice that they left together and have each other for
company on their way to heaven”, when you look at the items they left behind
and use them, keeping them in your thoughts and thanking them for giving you
something you can use every day and when you remember the stories and lessons
they gave you growing up because you can pass them on to your children, as well
as stories of how much they loved you.
When you look at pictures of them and instead of crying, you
think of how healthy they looked, how happy they were and ultimately realize
that this is just the way the universe intended for things to be right now.
I will attempt to show the audience my take on the 5 stages
of grief. Since I will be staying a whole city away from my university, I would
like to try and combine my love for theatre and sets, to attempt and make a studio
set-up at home within which I will attempt to tell a story.
- Key Points -
- My main aim is to make 5 setups for each stage of grief. The grief itself can be depicted in many variations, but the main goal is to try and keep it light and make it look like a dream-like or even satirical take on a person going through the 5 stages in their head,
- Although the original order is Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and the Acceptance, it has been stated that the order of the stages change from person to person so I might change them,
- I would like to use a lot of artificial lighting and very basic acting that can immediately explain the situation to you,
- I would like to focus a lot on the makeup of the character as well and change each look into something that matches the tone of the scene or overall vibe,
- I am considering on starting off with a black and white film and slowly adding in colour with each of the 5-6 scenes but that ends up depending on what sort of sets I make and on-the-spot decision making while I am editing,
- Clean cut transitions on a plain colour background for the shift to each of the stages,
- It will be an art film, a form of expression,
- I would like to incorporate a projector in one of the scenes, to have a video play over the main character to depict their internal struggles that will not come out.
- I am currently planning on incorporating classical music throughout, currently I've decided on Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals to sort of pace each of the scenes and give it a slightly chaplin-esque vibe.
I’ve yet to decide on a final aesthetic but if I were to
describe the entire concept, I would probably say its like a short film made on a photography set.
My main inspiration came from the photographer GiSeok Cho's work and how his pictures seem to come alive because of the intricate details and out-of-the-box props and set-ups he had. I wanted to literally bring a photography set alive with whatever resources I had available at home and set them up in my garage.
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