With out meeting on Saturday cancelled due to half of us either being away or ill, this was the first time we had met since last week. a new addition has been added to the group , Laurence Mcwhinnie who has chosen to take on the role of producer.
While I am talking about roles, it is good to point out what the people in our group are doing. The roles are as follows:
Joshua Prentice (myself): Cinematographer
Marcus Owramenko: Director/ Sound Editor
Laurence Mcwhinnie: Producer/Sound recordist
Kieran Woodhall: Editor (2 minute piece)
Bryony Rogers: Actress/ rotation
What I mean by rotation is that Bryony only wants to have a go at editing and directing and cinematography, and we have met her in middle and decided that she can come and bounce off assisting the rest of us in our roles, as she hates sound recording.
We had to summarise our final idea for the 2 minute piece today, and our previous plan of portraying isolation and depression, with a schitsophrenic protagonist has now been scrapped. In lesson I was worried as the idea would have been to complex in a 2 minute piece. Kieran suggested having 'fear' as a backup emotion. Taking into account the emotion also has to transfer to the 5-10 minute piece I cam up with an idea. This sudden brainwave occurred when the group were shown and asked to analyse scenes from Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shaning'. I have never seen the film, apart from a few small clips, and the style of how it builds tension in the audience surprised me, as I am to used to todays predictable Hollywood methods to incorporate fear in the audience.
The idea I have basically takes the skits' protagonist and turn is it into someone being stalked through phone calls. I again feel I have taken inspiration from a CSI episode in which a stalker calls up a woman. I explained that I pictured this starting with a couple of phone calls that at first irritate the protagonist, but as the short goes on, the film gets more personal, as eventually the stalker knocks at the door, thereby taking an easily ignorable phone call in to a terrorising moment when this caller is outside the door. My only negative will be that its been done several times, but I feel that with the right direction, we can break away from cheep Hollywood tricks and install a genuine fear in the audience, thereby fulfilling the brief. The brief says we need to enforce this characters world, so a dark tight space in which the protagonist (whom we have called Megan for the time being) where she can experience panic and fear will ensure we fit the brief. I also took this idea and moved it into the 10 minute piece in which a girl and a guy are on a date, and it all goes so well that she tells her lifelong male friend about it, after which the boyfriend gets suspicious and reveals himself to be a crazy obsessive person. In that I have incorporated the stalker aspect the fear and the phone.
We have decided to break until Saturday in which we will come together and decide how best it is to shoot on this exercise, and how we can make it unique and not another, 'we have seen this before scenario'. In the meantime I shall continue to research fear and I will be starting with the CSI episodes opening and look at how its shot and staged.
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