Starts off with a man sitting on a chair with a small popcorn in one hand and a drink in the other, which he sips from. A dolly moving back reveals him in a movie theatre foyer. An employee emerges from the double doors of the cinema, with a large black garbage back, as he clips the door to stay open, he nods to the man as if to say “you can go in now.” The man gets up but quickly realises his cup is empty. He walks over to the candy bar and asks the female employee “do you do free refills?”. She is scratching a scratchy, but stops a few seconds after his question. She looks up at him, her nails chipped and her dark lipstick smudged, and motions to a sign above the machine “NO free refills”, and then continues on with her scratchy. He walks away.

The man is seated in the middle of an empty cinema, eating his popcorn, which he doesn’t seem to be enjoying as much as he would be if he had a drink. The screen suddenly turns black, and he looks around the cinema and sees no one, so he calls out and asks what’s going on. With no response, he stands up with a heavy sigh and walks up to the stairs to the foyer. As he pushes open the double doors to the foyer, he sees the employee/usher dancing under a large disco ball. He is wearing a cowboy hat. Blue and red lights flash and reflect off the disco ball as he dances to electronic pop in the middle of the foyer.

The man goes into the bathroom to escape what he has just witnessed. He is confused. He stands at the sink and looks at himself in the mirror. Is he dreaming? He thinks to himself. He splashes water in his face and as he opens his eyes, a man in a suit appears next to him and asks “towel?” motioning to the towel over his forearm. He takes the towel and starts to say thank you but stops mid sentence and backs out of the bathroom. He turns around once out of the bathroom and bumps into the employee, “sorry for the technical issues sir, the movie is now running”. He is still wearing the cowboy hat.

After the film’s end, he pulls into his driveway and walks quickly to the front door and is shaking with his keys in his hand as he tries to open the front door. Once inside, he leans against the door and releases a sigh of relief, until he hears the sound of his TV in the other room. He walks in and sees the usher and the candy bar worker sitting on his sofa watching TV. They briefly acknowledge him and go back to watching the television. The man walks over to the empty armchair and sits down, only to see himself on the TV of a famous scene in a film. As he sits there with his mouth open, confused, out of frame the employee hands him a bowl (or box) of popcorn. He looks at the popcorn still in disbelief, but as he takes it he closes his mouth and leans back into the chair and starts to eat the popcorn.

–

I was thinking of calling it RODEO.

Now that I know what sort of world I want to create, I need to start considering characters and story. So I want to make this man, by himself in this movie theatre, quite an average middle aged guy. When he enters this cinema, he finds that all the staff members are all quite weird characters. I’m thinking that it’s late at night, possibly the last session of the day, so there are no other customers, with about three members working, at the candy bar, cleaning and ushering etc. The theatre would be really old-styled with the usher/movie theatre worker dressed in the typical usher uniform, for a bit of theatricality.

Not having much of a plot outlined in my head yet, I’m just thinking of little scenarios that the man might face with these employees, like having the cleaning not being able to hear him whilst vacuuming, causing an awkward scene of him yelling for assistance as the employee vacuums all the way into the staff room and disappears. An employee working at the candy bar could over eagerly denying him of a free refill, regardless of the large sign that reads “free refills”. These sort of awkward yet eerie situations would be interesting to work with in the world and project I want to create.

Not by the choice of my parents, I grew up with the close company of slasher films. In particular, the Nightmare on Elm Street films. Thinking about film worlds again, I think any of the films in the series are a great example. Throughout the films, there are dream sequences that provide a surreal drama, which are basically a nightmare for the character, where they can die in their dreams. In the dream sequences though, there are very different aesthetic qualities than in the “real” world of the film. The sets are more emphasised and dream-like and there are no rules, so things can happen like the walls can melt or a character appear suddenly in a new setting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnyrU10zRws

Some of the lighting and visuals in the films have also inspired me with this project. In a lot of the dream sequences, the filmmakers utilize neon lighting, it’s either used to distiguish the difference between dreams and real life, or used just to emphasize the action happening in the dreams. I think I might want to explore neon lighting more because I think it would fit really well with the setting of a cinema, but I could also just utilise colour more in production design and costume to create a quirky pop too.

References:

(Stills)

A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. (1985). [film] Jack Sholder

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. (1988). [film] Renny Harlin

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. (1989). [film] Stephen Hopkins

Since my last post I’ve been thinking more about the world that I want to create in this studio. Seeing the man, out of place to me, in the cinema, mentioned in my last post, got me interested in researching some films that use this aspect in film. The first film I thought of was the 2007 thriller 1408  (trailer below) which is a film about an author who checks into “haunted” hotels and debunks supernatural phenomena, enters a infamous hotel room. As soon as he enters the room, the room becomes it’s own world essentially, from the world the film started in, which when I first watched the movie was really chilling to me. The character describes it as a “lucid nightmare”.

There’s also a scene that I always think about during discussions about contained worlds, where in order to escape the room he climbs onto the balcony to get to the next room’s window, but on the ledge realises that there are no windows and his room is isolated in this massive hotel building. Whenever I watch a film (usually of the thriller or horror genre) that has a sort of contained world, I feel a nightmareish quality to it.

When I was considering 1408, I thought about the idea that there are two seperate worlds in this film, the actual and the one of the hotel room. When I started thinking about this, I tried to think of other films I’ve seen that explore this and one particular film came to mind; Tim Burton’s 2004 film Big Fish. This film has a fairytale element to it, because the film basically is the retelling of someone’s life, but exaggerated so much it creates this fantasy world that is dramatically different from the present world the stories are being told from. I’ve always really liked films like Big Fish that have a slightly left of centre world that stories are told in, with eccentric characters that really juxtapose themselves with the protagonist, who are quite realistic characters compared to real life.

So going forward with thinking about the world I want to create, I think I really want to create a world for this middle aged man I saw in the cinema. Creating a sort of surreal/fantasy world with strange and bizarre characters he comes in contact with. I don’t know if I would just want to set the film in this one world, or if I want to show the man in his own world to really contrast the difference to when he steps into the cinema and is met with this otherworldly place. It’s good I’m thinking about these things early on, so I can really concentrate on the tone I want to convey and the story I want to tell and how I want it to be told.

References:

1408. (2007). [film] Mikael Håfström

Big Fish. (2004). [film] Tim Burton

Finding inspiration is as important to me as finding an idea. There are some moments in life where you just see a location or a person walk past in the street and you are left with just this feeling of awe and these really stick with me. A recent inspiring moment for me took place at the cinema I always go to. As I waited outside the theatre, I noticed this man, probably in his 50s, sitting on the seat right opposite the doors of the cinema. He stared straight ahead as if nothing could distract him from those doors. He looked very clean. He looked as if he’d come straight from work, even though he was missing a coat jacket and a brief case. He sat there with a small popcorn in one hand, and a large drink in the other, in which he would occasionally sip from. I sat watching him for a few minutes, but not once did he break his stare and look over in my direction. He seemed really out of place to me, sitting there on his own, with the novelty cinema carpet, and the stale popcorn left at his feet from someone previous.

This visual was really strong to me. Sort of like he was in a different world to his usual one. This got me thinking on how I could interpret this into some of the discussions we’ve had in class about film worlds. I think we lightly touched on the topic of a character being brought into an unfamiliar world and this is how I see the scene that happened in front of me at the cinema. This came at a really great time for me, because I was lacking motivation and inspiration for my own project and I now have something I’m interested in looking further into. This semester though I have been drawn to more unusual and surreal worlds such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think I could try and create a surreal world for this man to enter in a film.

Prompt 1

Prompt 2

Prompt 3 

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.

After seeing everyone’s completed photo narratives from week 2, there were a few individual photos that really stuck in my mind. Especially the first photo of the “On The Run” series. Conveniently, we were given the task to choose a frame and write it as a scene. I’m not really that confident in my ability to write scripts, but just writing without thinking too much is a good place to start for me. I didn’t stick to the original narrative of the photo series, which shows a girl running through the RMIT campus, but I thought because the first frame of a shadow of a hand was quite ambiguous, the story could go anywhere. I’ve always been really interested in films about domestic relationships and dynamics, so the shadow of the hand lead me to a scene of abuse.

Frame from photo series On The Run

I wasn’t too focused on writing shots for the scene, I wanted to keep it simple to start of with, and just write a short scene or two. Overall I am pretty happy with this as a starting point, but I know there are definitely things I need to work on, which I will continue to over the course of this studio.

We touched a bit on tone last week and I think this is one thing that I’ve managed to portray in this short piece. I think I’ve managed to set a dark tone, with the subject matter and the action between the two characters. I initially thought that one thing that needed improvement was my character introductions, but seeing the dark tone I believe I have started to get at, this ambiguous opening to these character’s lives actually could work very well. The audience don’t exactly understand the dynamics between them and their history, which could lead to something interesting.

One thing I struggled with while writing, was how to write the ‘action’ of the script. As I said, I don’t have much experience in writing script in the correct format and structure like this and being told that it’s better to keep the action description short, I panicked a bit and started overthinking. I also haven’t read many scripts, which is something I need to do a lot more of, so I’m not really grasping the language that is supposed to be used. When writing the action, I knew what I was writing didn’t sound quite right, but I didn’t really know how to improve it. This must just come from practise. I also didn’t have the idea of ‘world’ in mind when writing this in class, which is quite foolish of me considering how much we’ve been focusing on it and how I wanted to incorporate creating worlds more into my work. If I were to keep going with this piece, I would make sure to really keep this in mind.

Something I did find really interesting learning in class was the use of description in dialogue, like you would see in books when a character mutters or sighs, this isn’t needed as much in a screenplay because you have the actor. If you give too much direction to the actor in a script, it doesn’t give them much room to fully commit to a character and work with the dialogue.

Throughout my experience in this media program, I’ve set myself up for failure when it comes to collaborative group work because it’s never a thing I’ve enjoyed doing in the past, but I’m quite surprised at how well it’s worked for me in past studios. Obviously collaboration is a massive part of media and film, so to me the most important thing is to have an open mind about different ideas from different people and let things roll out rather than cut them when they first stem. Especially in this studio, where ideas are really important in our current process, collaboration can really be a hidden gem when trying to flesh out an idea. “I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own”. This quote by John Cleese became apparent to me in a collaboration task in week 2. We watched a short film titled J’Attendrai Le Suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One) and were prompted to discuss how we think this short film could be the beginning of a feature film. It’s always quite difficult to start this discussion off, because there are so many different ways you could take it. A good place to start for us, was deciding on who the protagonist of the story was going to be and we chose the main female of the short. We threw out ideas and tried to see which one stuck. We had a few ideas that revolved around terminal illness, the afterlife and even a bit of a comedy.

Group flow is important to the overall dynamic, each member have to be open and willing to submit and accept ideas. There is this magical chemistry that is created through collaboration. This flow generates movement from one idea to the next. Because it seemed to be quite a simple task, I think the ideas were easy to spit out. Had this been a more difficult task, I think this really would have tested us both as a group and individually. There needs to be a balance where the task is attainable but challenging enough for the members of the group to push themselves.

The group dynamic we had worked really well, because we supported each others ideas and added our own spin to them and tried to see how far we could develop them. Feedback is really important in this group environment, it helps keep things on track. In a exercise like this one, where people are sharing ideas, work needs to be recognised, otherwise members of the group with become discouraged from sharing further ideas.  Even though we didn’t have a concrete idea to present to the class at the end of it, just a few different ideas, I still think this was a really great exercise to get us into the concept of collaborating.  

References:

Cleese, J. (1991). A Lecture on Creativity. Available at: https://vimeo.com/18913413 27:20mins.

J’attendrai le suivant. (2002). [film] France: Philippe Orreindy.

Since exploring the concept of film worlds, I’ve been continuing this conversation internally every time I watch a film now. I knew films had worlds, and sometimes different films existed in the same world (eg Spy Kids and Machete), but I don’t think I had quite grasped the idea of how idiosyncratic a film world can be. It was in the excerpt of the reading by Craig Batty “Writing the Screenplay” that really started my thinking into how I could create my own world in a film. In the reading Batty says that: “A well-crafted world can create a specific audience experience. a particular tone and feeling that the plot cannot convey on its own”, which really got me thinking about developing my own project. Setting tone is a really important factor in creating a distinct world and is something I really want to focus on. I usually tend to use a darker tone in previous projects that I’ve done, when it suits. I do like making light toned pieces, but my interest always lies in darker toned films. Along with tone, aesthetic properties such as setting and production design are important to world, not so much production design in the script, but I think it’s important to have that in mind when writing and developing a storyboard and organising the actual production.

Having spoken a lot in class about various different film worlds, I thought of one type of film world hadn’t exactly been covered in our class discussions and that is films whose worlds are affected by drugs. In Batty’s reading he says that, “A world can belong to a particular character, too” and I think this is relevant to the subject of drugs and perspective. The specific world I want to touch on is that of Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The visual world reflects the disorientation caused by the drug use of the characters. Having the film be set in Las Vegas, the already over-the-top city filled with twisting lights and streets filled with visitors, it already offers quite a distinct visual world, but with the use of the hallucinogenics, through the perspective of the characters we encounter the surreal imagery to match their mental state.

The world is also an exaggerated view of capitalism. The only thing in Vegas that matters is money. In the scene where they are stumbling out of the convertible, hardly able to walk or talk, the employees from the casino happily lead them through the entrance. This is also seen in the lobby scene of the second hotel, a screaming policeman is met with no respect as Depp’s character strolls in mindlessly and is welcomed and lead to his room. In many other locations, policeman are usually higher up and treated better than a cheaply dressed, obviously intoxicated person such as Depp’s character.

But the world is also untrustworthy due to the character’s mental and physical state of narration and perception. This is why I don’t believe this film world could co-exist in other film worlds, because it is how the main character perceives his world, so therefore it is an untrustworthy world. The film is displaying a misshapen reality, so there is a fundamental mistrust in everything the audience sees. 

Because this sort of surrealistic world is a personal taste of mine, it’s serving as quite an inspiration for the world I’m currently trying to develop for my project. I’m still in the very early stages of development, but it’s good to have a starting point of aesthetic and stylistic inspiration. After looking at the idea of confined worlds in films, it has really sparked my interest and I think I want to head down that path. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I think the world is confined to Las Vegas and the surrounding desert, almost as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist and I really like the idea of the world having clear boundaries and almost making the audience feel uncomfortably restricted in a closed off world.

After writing a draft of my screenplay for my project, I plan to use an excerpt of Batty’s reading to help me reflect on the world I’ve created and possibly lead to changes and improvements.

“How does the world affect the tone of what we see?
It is about internal logic: how does the world operate?
It is about the emotional experience of the audience: how is it generated by the world?
It is a vessel for theme and meaning: what stories can be told in this world?
And it is also about voicing a screenplay: does the world have its own voice, attitude or perspective?”

References:

Excerpt from: Batty, C (2013) “Writing the Screenplay” in A Companion to Creative Writing, Graeme Harper (ed) West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons (pp. 98-114).

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (1998). [film] America: Terry Gilliam.

Prompt: “I watched [insert title of screenwork here], and it got me thinking about…”

As our first 2 weeks were mainly focused on worlds in cinema, the topic of films with confined worlds came up quite often. I watched The Shining again recently, and it got me thinking about how just the setting of a world can impact a narrative so much. We spoke mostly about the worlds that are set in New York City, and how they affect the narrative, and whether or not films can exist in other film worlds. A film such as The Shining, which setting is so important to the narrative, simply could not exist in many other film worlds. There’s something haunting about the mountain-isolated Overlook Hotel, and this is given by the extremely powerful opening shot of a car driving through the rolling hills of nothing but greenery. No signs of life. This film could not take place in the world of movies set in New York City like Good Fellas or many of the recent superhero movies, or even other remotely set films such as Fargo. There’s a lack of a sense of community, which almost makes it feel as though outside the frames of the film, nothing exists. The car could keep driving forever and could just keep looping around the Overlook Hotel. Through the drama and suspense of the film, the setting creates a sense of abandonment, with no one to help the characters in danger. If the film was set in a populated town or city, there wouldn’t be as much fear for the character’s safety.

We also discussed other films with this certain binding effect of confinement such as The Truman Show and Room. These two both share similar factors, both being about a main character/s that has had their world made for them. In Room, the main protagonist is aware throughout the whole film that her world has been created by a man who adducted her, so she lives in the restrained world of a small bedroom. Her son on the other hand, was born in this room and is unaware of the world outside of his world, so his thoughts on his world are quite different to his mother. Similarly, in The Truman Show, we become aware that Truman has also been brought up in a world that has been artificially constructed for him, for the entertainment of the outside world. His motivations are determined by the makers of this world, as well as his fear of leaving the confined space. The line given by the creator of Truman’s world, Christof; “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented”, has really got me thinking about different realities of characters. Not only are there worlds in films,

I also realised that many of the short stories or short films I have made in the past have included a small film world. It’s possible that this may just be an easier way of creating little to no budget short films, but I also I’m more interested in the stories about characters who live with physical boundaries. I’m not about to start psychoanalysing myself, but having grown up in the suburbs and not having much exposure to city life, I think these stories are ones I can relate to, which give me more interest in them.

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.