After I saw La Jetee for the second time, I decided to try and produce my own film that consisted only of still images. I decided that, given that La Jetee was a Dystopian, I should aim to produce a film belonging to another genre. I picked German Expressionism.
As I have researched German Expressionism previously, I knew that the genre generally focused on the darkness in humanity, and generally aimed to be very unsettling and unusual. Movement is heightened and extreme, and there is a strong emphasis on light, creating extremes between shadows and highlights. Shadows also play a huge part in a German Expressionist piece, as they are dark and mysterious, are more ambiguous than an actual person… and that’s where the idea for my short came from.
(I also decided that I wanted an unexpected ending, for no reason other than I had no audience expectations to satisfy so could do what I wanted).
Scripting the piece wasn’t necessary, because I had a strong enough idea about what I wanted from which room, and my mum was the only one home to help me. She’s not particularly good with a camera, and we only had an iPhone light for lighting, but I think that those limitations actually served the project… it made the photos seem less staged, and the lighting more unpredictable and extreme, which in turn made it seem more frightening and odd.
For the final shot – I basically bought the last $4 cake at my local and blew up some balloons. That’s my Nonna and Nonno, and mother and brother (I took the photo). Pretty much the lowest production value, but it did serve the purpose.
In the other photos – I also tried to keep the background dark, so it was difficult to see.
After I had the photos, I imported them into Premiere Pro. I picked the soundtrack first (going back to my default old mate Kevin Macleod) and then started editing the images… I realised that I had used different orientations with the camera while I was shooting, but this actually added to the project. At times, there was black bars on either side, and then I actually started editing so these were there on purpose. I thought that they added to the mystery/confusion of the short… they made it harder to make out the image, which in turn, made it more frightening.
Other moments – like the knife and door opening – almost spoke to me, and I played around with different transitions (mostly with the black in between) and explored what looked good. There were a few images that were more effective and added more to the film if they only appeared for a few frames, as they created that sense of ‘what just happened’ and exacerbated the mystery.
Then, I thought that a lot of the images were too bright. Using an adjustment layer (which I only recently learned about) made this really easy… black and white was too far, but greatly taking down the saturation created a nice tone.
