The Florida Project was released in 2017 and was directed by Sean Baker, best known for his breakout indie hit Tangerine (2015), and stars Bria Vinaite as Halley, the mother of Moonee, played by Brooklyn Prince. The film is set in and around the motels near Disneyland in Florida, and is told through the perspective of Moonee, a child below the poverty line living in a low star hotel, oblivious to the misdeeds and debauchery that her mother gets up to just to pay the rent and live her lifestyle. The beautiful thing for me about this film for me, and what makes it one of my favourite films of all time, is how these heartbreaking situations these kids face can be told in such a human and relatable way that you can’t help but engage with it, and enjoy every second of it. How real everything feels. There are many reasons for this, but the two I am going to touch on today are the small perspectives and small castings  (see what I did there, see how I related it to Small Things).

The Florida Project is mainly told from the perspective of Moonee. This is explicitly told through her screentime in her film, and how we always come back to her for key plot points and moments. However, this is told implicitly through low angles and how the camera is framed around her and other kids. The story is told from the eyes of little people, children. The camera is always intentionally low in scenes of The Florida Project, keeping a tight frame around Moonee at her eye level, and often cutting off the torsos and heads of adults. An example of that is shown below.

This is representative of the innocence and ignorance of a child during adult and intense situations like the ones in the film. In the scene above, Halley is trying to sell a family pass to Disneyland to a passing stranger. During this scene, we mainly sit at this angle, following Moonee as she dances around, mimicking what her mother says, feeling like she is helping. We don’t see the full frame, because Moonee doesn’t see the bigger picture. She doesn’t know that what her mother is doing is illegal, and she certainly doesn’t know what we find out later in the scene, which is that Halley stole these from a client when she used her property to prostitute herself. We, like Moonee, are left down in the unknown, wondering what is going on, like when the ‘adults are talking’, that blissful ignorance so apparent in a child’s life.

Furthermore, Baker does an incredible job highlighting how big and magical the world is for a child, and how even the more depressing and dreary of places to an adult seem like wonderlands to a child. A great example of that is in the shot below.

We can barely make out the kids, walking alongside this massive store, with such a vibrant and enticing exterior. This sense of scale shows how small these kids really are, both physically and metaphorically in the grand scheme of this world. What is a tacky Orlando gift shop, ripping off Disney product in an attempt to profit off their properties is seen as a grandiose and larger than life attraction in their lives.  This sense of a smaller perspective is heightened in the casting for the film.

Sean Baker makes the characters in The Florida Project feel so real, relatable and small scale through his casting choices. This was both Bria and Brooklyn’s breakout films, and the story of how Bria came to be in this film is really quite inspiring. Baker was searching throughout Hollywood to find someone to play Halley, this full of life teenage mother who embraced the more childlike aspects of her personality, which in this film, become a detriment to her. He was unimpressed with what he had seen so far, but was in awe of how the attitude of a relatively small influencer on Instagram was so similar to that of his imagined character. This personality was Bria Vinaite, and with what started as a small exchange, ended up being the breakthrough of her career, landing her various gigs post the film’s production. This lack of emphasis on stardom makes the characters of Moonee and Halley feel so real. We haven’t seen these people play anything but these characters. We believe they are these characters through masterful writing and structure. From small and humble beginnings, rose masterpieces.

The Florida Project to me is one of the most influential pieces of media when I think about how I want to make films. Its story is told through short and small interconnected scenes, fleshing out these characters and the world around them. And it wouldn’t be anywhere without its’ small things.

The Florida Project. (2017). [film] Directed by S. Baker. USA: A24.

Exposure is not your friend on set, I learnt that the hard way.

So this was our (Tessa, Belinda, Astley, John and I, featuring Alyssa and Leslie’s) second attempt at the now infamous “Lenny 4” script, feat the box. Before we went on set, we sat down and decided what we wanted to change in this shoot compared to the previous one. Quality of quantity in regards to shots was a unanimous decision that was reached, as well as wanting to be more conscious of shot and story continuity, with characters entering and exiting frame in a way that would make sense when in the editing booths.

Shooting went well overall. We cut down on the number of shots on average we had for a scene, sticking closer to the script and important aspects, such as getting a close up of the box in scene 2 with Sharon. A big issue/worry we had while on set was the exposure, and whether the shots would look overexposed in Premiere. While I think this is a fault with me rather than the equipment, I feel like I really struggle to get a clear idea of what shots are truly going to look like from the camera viewfinder or screen. My eyes see everything with a tint of blur and compression, which means I really don’t get a clear sense of what the shot looks like until I get to see it up on a monitor, especially with exposure.

While I know a bit about the zebra lines, and last class really did help with that, specifically where you want the exposure lines, this is all still a learning process for me. We played around with a bunch of the camera’s settings on the day, adjusting the aperture and flicking between ND filters, but I personally couldn’t get a feel for the shot, I just had to trust it.

When it came down to the edit, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. My biggest fear was the shot I open my edit with. I love the framing and how Lenny stumbles down the stairs, but the amount of light that comes down through the windows behind him really made me nervous. You could barely see a lot of Lenny, and it looked super overexposed. After a bit of colour correction over the top of the B&W filter, I was able to have Lenny clearly visible whilst not being insanely dark.

Exposure is one of those things I am bound both crack and never crack, I just gotta trust my eyes, maybe get some glasses too.

Sometimes, there can be too many shots.

This was our (Tessa, Belinda, Astley, John and I’s) first attempt at tackling the “Lenny 4” script, and our first real shoot for the Small Things studio. While on set, we really meticulously planned out what shots and angles we wanted for this project, marking camera positions and creating a succinct shot list. Once shot, we felt really happy with what we had captured in the limited time and prompts given, and uploaded the footage onto Google Drive for editing to commence.

I felt really good about my rough draft of the edit, scenes were coming together and while they didn’t make too much sense in the grand scheme of the story of the script (but that might have more to do with the actors forever switching), I was enjoying watching through it. However, once reviewing the rough assembly the next day, I realised. There were too many shots.

Scenes of 10 seconds would have upwards to 3 to 4 cuts to different shots within them, which became jarring and incoherent with ever watch. For example, in scene two, the script states that Sharon walks through a laneway, looking up and around anxiously as she walks with the box for Lenny. Adapting the laneway to a hallway, we took 3 different shots of the scene. A wide shot of Sharon walking, a mid shot with way too much headroom and a close up of her feet in motion. In my edit, I decided to use all 3 in my rough cut, with the shots switching between each other at such a pace that a viewer would struggle to understand what was going on in the scene, whether these were all Sharon, and if the box they only saw for a second had any significance.

This abundance of incoherent shots definitely gave us more insight into how to shoot when we reshot the scenes the following week, focusing on the shots that worked and if they would make sense when cut and spliced together.

There were many different reasons and factors as to why I decided to put the Small Things studio as my first preference for semester 3 in 2019. Originally, I knew a few people who took it as their first studio last year, and seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed it. Furthermore, I knew that Paul Richards ran the course, and after having him in Media 1, I felt a sense of security and familiarity joining a studio already being on good terms with the tutor.

However, after reflecting on the selection process while writing this piece, I realised that my biggest draw to this studio was to make ‘small things’. I absolutely cherish and will never forget the unique, out of the box and compelling filmmaking and storytelling techniques I learnt and constructed in the Seeing the Unseen V2 studio with Hannah, but I felt this yearning to make something simpler. To start small and work my way up incrementally, and I have a feeling that Small Things is going to scratch this itch.

The studio home page on canvas prompts the idea that building on ideas piece by piece, with constraints, stimulates better products and outcomes. To evaluate on that mess of a sentence, basically, does gradually making small products, with different goals and guides, make you a better and more thought out filmmaker? I hope so, otherwise, this studio would be for nothing!

I jest, but this idea of making ‘small things’ fascinates me. On the presentation night for last years Small Things studio, I got to see some final products from the class, both from peers and strangers. I loved the vision behind all these products. Contained and simple stories with such visual and creative flair that it didn’t even matter that they were only a couple minutes long, they were enjoyable, and some visually striking. While I don’t necessarily want to make the same things as the last semester, I do want the next couple months of creation to influence an idea that I will be really proud of, however small the thing may be.