images
Task 1 was to choose someone of our past and re-write about the life they’ve been leading ever since we’ve lost touch. This task is group work.
My group shared some stories between ourselves. In the end, the person / character that we picked was someone Pei Wen used to be friends with. Here is a brief summary of her story:
She met a guy during her secondary 2 overseas school trip but didn’t really take notice of him until a year later when they ended up in the same class. At first, she thought that it was a coincidence that he would be around wherever she was, but she started to catch on that he had feelings for her. She didn’t feel the same way back. Once, he confessed to her about how he had dreams about her and having nightmares about her being trapped in a cage. A few years later, he sent her a text saying that they should “forget each other” and that they “should move on” when there was nothing between them in the first place. She later found out that he suffers from depression.
Through her story, we came up with the idea of a delusional and mentally unsound character. We thought, what if the character lost someone special , how would he/she react? We researched a little about how people may react after losing a loved one and on mental illnesses. Schizophrenia was something that we looked into. I remember seeing once in a drama that the person is delusional into thinking that the person didn’t die and is still alive. We then crafted our story based on that idea. We tried to incorporate some symptoms of schizophrenia into our images.
- Hallucinations
- Delusions
- Bizarre or disorganised behaviour
- Anger
- Violence
Yi Ting and Rebecca did some storyboards.
Since we were an all girl’s group, we changed the main character to be a girl, just so it’d be convenient for us to do the shoot.
We asked ourselves some questions before the shoot. What is the overall mood of the short film? How do we show that the sister is actually dead, in the scenes where she is seemingly alive?
We decided to blur the dead sister so that it represents the idea of a person that is not really there. But after shooting, we realised that instead of making the appearance of the sister surreal, it looks more like she was moving very fast. Plus the bathroom was clearly not a personal bathroom. We also find that our story lacked some images that made the flow of the story weird. So we decided to reshoot.
Taking inspiration from Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez, 2005) whereby the film is in black and white but they selectively saturate the colour red, we did the same for one scene. The drawings are supposed to tell viewers about the truth that the sister is dead, but it wasn’t clear when we converted the image to black and white. So we decided to saturate just the drawings to bring viewer’s focus to the drawings.
Sound
Task 2 was to tell this story using sounds. I had a rough idea of what sounds to use. For the parts where the our main character is alone, I used diegetic environmental sound. I made sure that the ventilation sound of the bathroom is prominent. The water dripping sound is also heard throughout the bathroom scene to convey the slow passing of time and “stillness”.
This is based on personal experience. Though I have never actually experienced full fledged depression, I had a period of time when I was extremely down and had low motivation. Back then, I remember each day passing very slowly. Every action that I took seemed to feel like eternity. I really took in every sound of my environment when I was alone. Hence, I recreated that mood / environment for this character.
Then, I faced a problem. How do I use sound,to show that the sister, who is actually dead, isn’t actually there?! All I knew was that I didn’t want to include every single sound that could’ve been heard in the scene because when you’re with someone you love, sounds around you are negligible.
I initially used the sound of a music box tune. But it felt extremely out of place since there was no music box in our entire film. In the end, I solved this problem by thinking about words that describe the scene. Keywords like surrealism, dreamy, imagination, fake and unreality came to mind.
From there I thought of what sounds best convey those words. I vaguely recall this whistle like sound made by twirling a PVC tube, but there weren’t any recordings of that sound online, and I don’t have anything like a PVC tube so I couldn’t recreate that distinct sound. Thankfully, I found a sound called “processed shimmer”. It conveys the surrealism and unreality part very well. So I used that for the parts where the sister appears.
