Assignment 03: A Short film about Dreams

TASK

Create a Mise-en-scene short film depicting ‘Dreams’.

Final film

IDEA / CONCEPT

Dreaming about doing work and waking up to find that the piece of work is not completed is something that I experience quite often myself. I decided to create a somewhat experimental short film that is relatable to the viewer. The start of the film feels ambiguous, we do not know that we are looking at a first person view of the character in her dream. Only at the end then it is made clear that it is a dream. I wanted the overall look and feel of the film to be on the mellow side.

Reference videos

I gained a lot inspiration from experimental films with slow pacing.

STORYBOARD

I intentionally used a lot of close up / medium close up first person view shots as that is all we see or remember in our dreams (unless the dream is third person view). By not showing the character in the beginning and only revealing the face at the end, it would make it clearer that this whole sequence was a dream. I use the drink and chips to show the passing of time in addition to all the typing.

Shooting & EDITING

The film was shot over 2 days (1 day for reshooting shots that I didn’t quite nail on the first day) at Rebecca’s dorm, using the Nikon D7000. Framing the shots was difficult in the small space of her dorm since most of the shots were “first-person view”. The shot of her waking up had to be shot “blindly” because there was not enough room to place a tripod on the table and the lens was not wide angle enough.

 

Since the concept is very simple with a lot of repetitive shots, I tried to play around with pacing. The build-up was particularly difficult to achieve — I had to rework that part multiple times. It might have to do with my choice of shots. Increasing the speed of the clips helped in quickening up the pace of the film.

I also faced some problems with colour grading as the lighting was not ideal. I tried to shoot in natural daylight as much as possible but towards the late afternoon the daylight was not sufficient. We had no choice but to turn on the room lights, which gave the footage a warm tone which was difficult to work with in post production.

I colour graded the shots after the character wakes up to be darker and a cooler tone to give contrast between the two states of being in a dream vs. real life.

 

Sound

Instead of pacing the film around a piece of music, I decided to just include diegetic sound. It was tough sourcing for music that fits the theme and duration of the film as it has to increase in tempo at the right timing. I also tried using softwares to compose my own music but figuring out the softwares took too long.

The audio from the footage was noisy, so I borrowed the Zoom H4n record my own sound effects. I used Audacity to do some simple editing with the sounds after that (mainly noise reduction). Any other sound effects that I couldn’t replicate nicely was taken from freesound.org.

I increased the volume of the sound effects when the cuts of the clips speed up. Reverb was added to the ticking sound of the clock during the dream so that it hints that something is amiss.

 

 

Assignment 2 Final: UNREALITY

Group members

Chiharu, Pei Wen, Rebecca, Yi Ting

Premise

How would you react if you lost someone you cared about? This short film uses sequential images to tell a story about a girl who is mentally unsound. In her world, her dead sister never died.

Genre

Psychological

The story was created based off a real person’s personality and character.

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.

Synopsis

The main character, the girl,  is seen going through pages of drawings alone. In the next scene, we find ourselves in the bathroom with the girl. She engages in her usual routine of brushing her teeth, washing her face and fixing her hair. She pauses and stares into the mirror. She is joined by her sister, and they share an intimate moment before leaving to meet a friend. Upon meeting the friend, the girl wonders why her friend was not giving attention to her sister. In this very moment she begins to realise the truth about her sister’s “presence”. Being in a state of delusion and emotional instability, she reacts by hitting her friend. We see the girl going through the drawings again, this time accompanied by mini flashbacks of memories with her sister. The end is vague, we don’t know what action the character is going to take. It is purely up to the viewer’s imagination.

Interpretation

We borrowed elements from a real life account and threw in a scenario for the character to react. From the real life story, we came up with a mentally unsound and delusional character possibly experiencing schizophrenia.

We attempted something a little different by not including the full faces of each character. This helped give the film some mystery, and hopefully give more impact to the viewer.

The film is mostly in black an white to allow the viewer to focus on the story instead of being distracted by the colours on screen. The only element in the film that is in colour are the drawings of the two sisters. This portrays the emotion of the character. The happy times that she spent with her sister are captured in the drawings they did.

We used a few props to signify the presence of someone dear. For instance, the toothbrushes that appear in the beginning and at the end. Toothbrushes are seen to be an intimate object. We see that in the beginning there were two. In the end, we see only one because the presence of the sister was a delusion by the character. Another prop (or props) that we used are mirrors. They symbolise the threshold between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. By looking into a mirror, one may look towards the depths of their unconsciousness.

Individual choices

I made the arrangement of my film different from the others to experiment with how sequencing images differently give a completely different effect to the story. While the others placed the scene where she is flipping the drawings right at the back, I decided to introduce some shots right at the beginning to foreshadow the fact of the dead sister since drawings are sentimental.

I also chose not to include some photos that we shot. There was a scene with the main character opening the curtains with her sister. We had shot a similar scene with just the main character opening the curtains. However I did not include that as I felt that it did not go with my sound design, and there were too many of such overlapping elements (e.g. the toothbrushes in the beginning and end) which I thought was overkill.

A few of my decisions made were based on what kind of person the main character was. I see her being in a state of depression almost, hence the slow pacing of the film.

Sound design

The sound of water droplets was used to convey stillness and the slow passing of time. It is present in the beginning, and reused at the end even though the character is not in the bathroom.

Details such as the sound of bathroom ventilation was purposely included, to convey loneliness, because the character takes in every sound that she hears. It complements the sound effects of the action by action shots as well.

Processed shimmer is used to convey surrealism and unreality. It gives the impression to the viewer that something is off, and it foreshadows that something bad is about to happen.

The increasing volume / intensity of the reversed cymbal sound is used to build to the climax of the story.

 

 

Assignment 2 Sequencing Images: Research & Process

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.

Storyboards by Yi Ting and Rebecca.

 

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.

I lowered the shutter speed to attempt to blur Yi Ting but it didn’t produce the result that we wanted.
Here it looks like she’s moving very fast.

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.

Schindler’s List
Sin City

 

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.

Action by action worked together with the sound to help convey the message that time was passing slowly. Each action is emphasized.
Reverb helped create the mood.

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.