‘Leonard in Slow Motion’ is an interesting (narrative driven) short film telling the story of a man who lives a slow motion life in a ‘regular speed’ world. The concept is slightly hard to describe however from a technical standpoint I think the filmmakers have really succeeded in creating a refreshing film.
Lighting:
- Compared to ‘Drive’ and the visual style I would like to experiment with in my Film3 experiments, the lighting of this film is quite flat. It looks like a lot of available light sources have been used in this office scene as well as what I think would have been LED lights & bounce-boards.
- A decent amount of the light seems to be coming from overhead lights (likely existing light sources), however there are numerous shots that seem to have been heavily lit with specific film-lights.
- The flat-ish lighting style was likely chosen to match the setting of the dull office space. It seems to conform with the common representations of cubicle grids in modern film/tv in this way.
- Actors don’t seem to be lit from the off-side, a lot of the time it looks like the light is hitting their ‘on-side’ and this was possibly due to limitations of the location (I’m making an informed guess that this was filmed on location.
Editing/VFX:
- The entire film would have involved a lot of compositing of footage. In other words, to achieve the effect of slow-motion Leonard interacting with ‘normal-speed’ scenes – multiple shots would have had to be filmed and then stitched together in post.
- To achieve the coffee pouring shot the camera would have been locked off on a tripod. A shot of Leonard pouring his coffee would then be filmed AND THEN (without moving the tripod) a shot of the man reacting would also be filmed. These 2 shots would then be stitched together and edited so that the focus pull lined up. Finally, a small amount of camera shake would have been digitally added to disguise the stitching of the clips.
Sound:
- the soundtrack has been kept fairly minimal, with foley sound fx remaining isolated and clear. There isn’t too much sound layering going on a lot of the time HOWEVER, the atmospheric office soundscape was quite detailed – being constructed from a range of sounds: printers, typing, etc.
- This resulted in the dialogue being easy to listen to and interpret, and this was important as a lot of the humour/information given throughout this piece is through the writing & delivery of lines.