When I started this project, my main goal was to achieve multiple storytelling in multiple timelines through the manipulation of time and space. The end results makes for a nonlinear form of storytelling. Being able to understand this technique meant I could alter time and space while at the same time keep my audience captivated. Besides that, being able to understand this technique gave me a better understanding of planning and teamwork.
What I have managed to achieve from this research is a better appreciation for film productions. Having to take up most of the roles to shoot my experimental film, I understood the importance of a strict timeline and how essential it is to have prepared everything before the actual shoot date. A lot of planning had to be done prior to the shooting day.
To make this blog easier, I will break it down to a few points and elaborate on those.
Pre-Production:
By far this was the toughest step among them all. A clear understanding on what story I want to tell and how I wanted to tell it was crucial before shooting. I had to plan three stories in order to achieve this effect. The first story, which is the main story had to be properly written before I was able to write the other two. This is important because I had the built the other 2 stories based on the first storyline in order to get the story to relate.
Besides that, deciding the types of cuts for the transition was very important as well. I didn’t want to go with the very cliche “dip to white” kind of shots because I felt it was overused was a lazy form of storytelling as well. So I decide to go for two kinds of cuts, a match cut and a quick jump cuts. The match cut was mainly inspired by Edgar Wright’s film because I thought it was a pretty interesting film technique to be done. Not only was it useful in comedy, but I wanted to see if it could work on the emotions of intimacy as well.
The quick cut on was meant to be a quick way of narrating both the main stories and the fight to show the intensity of the fight. The quick cut allows the audience to register what they think is going on, at the same time give them room to interpret why the main character was depressed. This form of cutting shows how we as an audience can quickly understand and register both stories, while giving room for interpretations as well. This also shows that we are visually stimulated as a whole.
Production:
Since I’ve spent quite some time on planning, shooting was a breeze. I communicated well with my crew and understood that most of them had to leave by the afternoon.This gave us a gauge on the limited amount of time.
Understanding the lack of time we had, I scheduled the shoot to be done early in the morning where the sun was our main source of lighting. Having the sun as the main source of lighting really saved our time because the overall lighting for the set remained consistent, and not much lighting changes need to be done. Besides that, the lighting also set a very nice mundane look on the actor and actresses face, helping to set the tone of the film.
On the set day itself, I had help from a guy who’s name is Bryan as well. With Bryan’s help, we manage to shoot coverage of the scene in a very short time. Having to work with Bryan on previous shoots, we understood how we wanted to cover the scene, this helped us a lot in saving our time and he as well understood my vision for my film. Communications among the crew is very important in a shoot like this, especially since we don’t have the luxury of time.
Being creative on set remains to be one of the most important aspect of shooting. There were a few minor hiccups on the day of the shoot, for example the actress not being able to cry. Our solution to that was we chopped up some onions and put the bowl next to her, making it easier for her to shed tears while we shoot. Another problem was getting the hot water to fog up the room, so what we did was turning on the hot water from the shower and let it fog up the room. Small things like these helped us figure a way to complete shooting the film and I was satisfied with the final results.
Post-Production:
In post-production, I bumped in to multiple problems as well. Even Though I had the continuity sheet to help me out with the editing, there were a few minor details that bugged me. Since I decided to go for a quick phase cutting style, many of those little details either remained unoticable or too slow for the audiences to catch it.
Besides that, on my first draft of the export there were a few narrative problems which could leaves the audiences confused. I had to rearrange the scene, which in the final product allowed the story to be narrated more clearly. These minor tweaks and attention to detail of the film plays an important role to the overall narrative to the film. One small mislead in details can leave the audiences confused and astrayed from the real meaning of the film.
Conclusion:
Overall, I learnt a lot from this little experiment. Not having to worry too much on the technical point of the film really made me understand narrative in the film clearly. Attention to detail remains to be very important in a film as it can really mislead audience’s interpretation of the film.
Although jumping between space and time is an interesting and powerful technique for storytelling, it remains to be pretty complex and very time consuming to pull off. The planning really took up a lot of time, but overall I was very pleased with the final result of the film.