IDEATION

First off, just to introduce, my group cponsists of Chiharu, Pei Wen and Rebecca!

So we started sharing childhood acquaintances and friendship stories with each other, and we decided to work on someone from Pei Wen’s past. To put it simply:

She knew a guy by name but they never got the chance to interact until they were assigned to the same class. From there, they managed to click and became friends through common interests. Things got a little weird as this guy appeared wherever she went, tagging along whenever there’s something she’s attending to. Then one day he confessed, but she had no mutual feelings so she rejected him. He seemingly stopped but returned to tell her that he had dreams of her and nightmares of her being trapped and helpless. Not only so, he texted saying they need to ‘move on’ and ‘forget each other’, when there was literally nothing between them at all. It was really strange, though she realised he had depression and his clingy delusions probably stemmed from that.

Deciding on a more mysterious and psychological theme (yet again), this person fit the role well.

The character was delusional, so we did some research on mental illnesses of the like. Schizophrenia became the main focus of our research, as we wanted the character to be unable to discern between reality and her work of mind. She would go through unstable moods, aggression and hallucinations.

With the character’s base set, we needed a premise. What would stir a little drama but also balance out with the mystery we wanted to have? Thinking back to how the original guy would be unintentionally clingy, we gave the character someone important that they end up losing. The main character would probably cling on to whatever memory she has of that loved one, who was her sister, and in turn the obsessive behaviour blurs her boundaries of reality and imagination.

The intended climax – the main character eventually realising her sister is gone and won’t ever come back, and she has to learn to live on without her.

Goodnight Mommy (2014) is an Austrian film that features a pair of twins but one of them is actually dead, a figment of the living twin’s imagination. This was a good example of what we wish to achieve for shots with both sisters.

Once the storybeats were finalised, Rebecca and I worked on some draft storyboards:

SHOOTING

The storyboards were followed loosely as we went with the flow and got better ideas for shots along the way. We actually had to reshoot on different days due to conflicting schedules and the availability of some of the locations. Also, props to Chiharu for shooting for us! It was a tiring ordeal!

While shooting we faced the difficulty of portraying the non existent sister: do we want to use blur? Put her outside of frame? Lower her opacity?

We tried using motion to create the blur, hoping it shows surreality but it just ended up looking like she was moving very fast all the time.

Remembering how Goodnight Mommy places the dead twin in shots, we positioned the sister either uncomfortably out of frame, partially covered or simply oddly placed without following rule of thirds.

So the filtering began and we finalised on a decent amount of usable shots.

Then it was the photo editing! I edited most of them, tweaking them into black and white, adjusting different settings and levels to ensure the photos fit the intended moods perfectly. Following the film noir aesthetic of being mysterious and serious, the black and white visuals really enhances the mood while also minimalising noise and distractions.

There were a few shots that required further manipulating as we did not have time to completely reshoot – mostly removing certain elements of the photo. When the drawings are on screen, it becomes the only thing that’s coloured to bring focus and also giving off importance and sentimentality, like how Sin City (2005) does it to guide the viewers’ eyes to crucial elements.

Audio will be covered in the Final posting!