Creative Development Blog

When we were first given this assignment, I was excited to use it as a chance to expand not only my technical skills and to gain more practical experience, but to express myself creatively and input towards an idea. However soon after we began our project, I realised that there would not be a lot of room for me to move creatively, so I kind of “switched off” in a creative sense, so to speak.

Although we sort of chose my pitch for the project, the final piece was immensely different to my original intention. My original pitch was a simple, short conversation between two characters, with no major narrative. It would simply be an exercise in cinematography and realistic screenwriting (two areas I wish to expand on much more in my next project). We also discussed the ideas of having an internal dialogue, and exploring themes of conscious and unconscious mind.

While I blame myself for this, I missed a class soon after we chose my pitch, and during that class the group switched the focus towards the more narrative based and melodramatic piece that we have ended up with. I feel strongly that this change of focus, mixed with some practical issues, have led to our final piece which I personally find to be of a far lower quality and benchmark than what we were capable of.

During an early discussion with Neville, we considered an interesting idea involving what he called a “shadow effect”: an editing technique in which we film two shots, using the same actors in different clothes, from the exact same angle, and lay one over the other and reducing opacity, creating a ghost like or shadow effect.

 

I thought this was an interesting idea and would be a simple yet different way to have an internal dialogue of sorts. However when Ben began writing the script, he changed the idea to having 4 actors, and scrapping the shadow effect. (Although I am listed as a co-screenwriter, Ben wrote the entire first draft alone despite several attempts to collaborate and see an unfinished version to provide notes on. By the time the draft was finished, it was too far gone and changing back to the original idea would involve scrapping lots of Ben’s work). I helped with the next couple of drafts (mainly with specific language and wording more than any narrative structure) but the majority of the script was written by Ben.

At this point I was happy to just fulfil my role on sound, recording all the dialogue and field recordings on the set. I will hope to take a more central creative role in my next project as I understand that sometimes you have to take a back seat in the creative process.