Statement of Written Intentions
My aim for this course was to make a short film between 3 Р5 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 clich̩, 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.
