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.