Evaluation

My initial brief for this project was to make a short film, about 3-5 minutes long. I was told I could use anything from a wide range of styles, including cartoon animation, stop motion animation, or real life. I chose to use real life as I think my skills using pictures or clay or computers are limited, so I would have a wider range of things I could do, and a bigger scope of ideas I could work on. It also meant that the filming process was faster; so I would have more time to edit my film, and give it a smoother more professional feel. I think a good example of this is the short sequence when the main character is in the kitchen making a cup of tea. It is a 45 second sequence made of several short clips, this was easy to film once I had planned everything I wanted in the sequence. And because I did not have to spend more than 45 minutes filming it, I had plenty of time to edit it to a finish I was completely satisfied with. The end result is smooth, quick, and gives the impression of time passing by without us having to actually experience the wait. This is exactly what I was going for.
I had originally intended to make a film about boredom, and everyday routine. And while I was making it I realised that the song ‘Sunday Morning’ by The Velvet Underground would fit perfectly. It does so because it has the same slow, soft drawn out feel as my footage, and the lyrics (if taken literally, ignoring the underlying drug context) were in fact about the boredom of a Sunday morning. For research I listened to a lot more of The Velvet Underground’s work, and started to discover their surreal edge in songs like ‘Venus in Furs’ and ‘Heroin’. For this reason I decided to put a surreal twist into my film.
The sequence in which the main character walks up stairs and levitates the magazine towards him was the most surreal part in my film; it also took the longest to shoot. This is because to do it I had to film myself walking down the stairs backwards, after dropping the magazine at the top, ten playing it backwards gave the illusion that I was walking up the stairs forwards, then elevating the magazine towards me. This trick was originally used by Charlie Chaplin, who invented many camera tricks.

Chiaroscuro

 

Chiaroscuro is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark. The term is usually applied to bold contrasts affecting a whole composition, but is also more technically used by artists and art historians for the use of effects representing contrasts of light, not necessarily strong, to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects such as the human body.

Chiaroscuro is used in cinematography to indicate extreme low-key lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness in films, especially in black and white films. Classic examples are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).

However, possibly the best-known example of chiaroscuro in modern filmmaking is the Italian film Cinema Paradiso.

Frank Miller's Sin City is an example of this style in both the graphic novel and the subsequent film, as is Mike Mignola's Hellboy.

In photography, chiaroscuro is often effected with the use of "Rembrandt lighting". In more highly-developed photographic processes, this technique may also be termed "ambient/natural lighting", although when done so for the effect, the look is artificial and not generally documentary in nature.0

 

Possibly the most direct personification of the intent of chiaroscuro in filmmaking, though, would perhaps be Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, in which the principal photography was shot primarily with a modified Mitchell BNC camera, and a Zeiss lens manufactured for the rigors of space photography, with a maximum aperture of f/.7. When informed that no lens currently had a wide enough aperture to shoot a costume drama set in grand palaces using only candle-light, Kubrick bought and retrofitted a special lens for these purposes. The naturally unaugmented lighting situations in the film exemplified low-key, natural lighting in filmwork at its most extreme outside of the Eastern European/Soviet filmmaking tradition (itself exemplified by the harsh low-key lighting style employed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein).

With the recent advent of high-speed filmmaking, Barry Lyndon has not stood long as the lone example of unaugmented cinematic chiaroscuro realism. Darius Khondji (Se7en), Janus Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan), carry on the technique using film that, in some instances, is up to 20x faster than the film Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon on.

Statement of Written Intentions

 

My aim for this course was to make a short film between 3 – 5 minutes long. My original intention was to make a music video, with a surrealist twist. But I decided at the end to add a small amount of speech to give it a definite ending. The song I chose was Sunday Morning by The Velvet underground. However I did not want to include drugs in my film because I thought it was a bit of a cliché, so instead I decided to focus on the other theme of the lyrics in the song, which was boredom and monotony.

            For this reason I have my character doing ordinary routine things, such as making a cup of tea and eating cereal. But because I wanted to give it a surreal twist, I had him performing minor pieces of magic, such as slowing down time and levitating objects. I chose to include these surreal effects because I know that The Velvet Underground as a band often look towards the surreal and pioneered a lot of the slightly off-key sounds that exist in modern music today; a classic example of this is ‘Venus in Furs’, off the same album as Sunday Morning, it is over 6 minutes long without any major changes, therefore creating a sense of monotony within the song without losing its classy feel.

            To research my film I thought about the soft, slow feel of Sunday Morning, and decided to compare that to the soft, drawn out, yet powerful film making of Gus Van Sant, especially the movie ‘Elephant’. In my film there are some references to the film elephant, for example when my character throws his hat in the air and it all slows down, this is a reference to the scene in Elephant when the main character holds a tennis ball up for a dog and everything goes into slow motion, to show that this is a reference I tried to have my character stand in the same position as the character in Elephant, and also be the same distance away from the camera. I think this worked a bit, but not to the extent that it is noticeable to someone who has not seen Elephant more than once.

            

FORMALISM AND REALISM

Formalism is a theory of film and film making. It considers the combination of elements in  film to create an atmosphere or feeling. For example, a formalist would take a scene of a film and consider how the music track in the background creates a more comforting effect, or adds to the sadness of a scene depending on the action taking place. 

 

Formalism is something that is used in the making of most major hollywood movies, it makes the audience passive and means they can pay attention to storyline or character rather than the way a movie is shot, it is about making a film, not trying to represent real life.

Realism on the other hand is almost entirely about recreating real life and naturalism. Often a realist when making a film will reject such film techniques as flashbacks or dream sequences, because these are film devices rather than projections of real life.

Many realist films are documentaries,one such film is 'supersize me' by Morgan Spurlock. It is about a man who eats only McDonalds for a period of time and becomes extremely unhealthy. This is obviously a realism film because it is non-fictional and not dressed up as a story in any way.

Some films however are less easy to define, 'Spinal Tap' for example is a fictional film, with actors, but uses all realist techniques. It follows an imaginary rock band and how they slowly fall a part.  But it can be seen as more than just a 'mockumentary' or spoof because of the unique way in which it was created. Instead of being given lines to deliver like in an ordinary film, it uses an almost Stanislavskian method of creating the dialogue. The actors are told to get into the mindset of the characters, and then improvise. So in this sense it is far closer to a documentary than your average spoof.

A good example of a formalist film would be 'Jurassic Park'. The famous Steven Spielberg film about a dinosaur park. It uses many conventional formalist techniques. Creatures that no longer exist, backing music, and sensational ideas that reflects nothing realistic.