Our group work for assignment 4 was screened and certainly engaged with the audience. We were pleased to hear laughter in the crowd and many viewers and friends came up to me afterwards wishing that it were longer! Our work hoped to visually communicate our core themes of the genre, and what our studio visual blueprint aims to convey, show don’t tell. For instance, when we worked on the themes we really focused on the location and the personality traits of the characters when compared to the protagonist. We wanted to visually and audibly convey ways that Dave felt beneath the rest of the guests at the dinner party. In the film before act 3, we have a long tableau, camera focused on Dave as he sits silently wanting to leave as the other guests talk around him ignoring him. The audio becomes louder as the camera isolates Dave to be the centre of the frame. The visual cues and audio balance helps us convey this sense of closed space, visualising how Dave feels closed off and isolated from the rest of the group.
When it comes to working on this media project further, we would want to improve and extend the complexity of the environments. Since we are a student led production with a low budget, we relied purely on one location to tell a 7-minute-long story. In an alternative reality, we would have loved to have two locations and stick to the original beginning of the story, which was a montage sequence of all the guests preparing for the evening. With only one location to film, we had to scrap this idea and flow to a less complicated beginning. This really impacted the script and storyboard as our ideas could not go as planned and we had to gorilla style on the spot. This also comes together with the run sheet; we really need to organise our schedule and filming more appropriately especially when we need to adapt to a challenging location. Nonetheless, we did commence on a healthy filming alternative.
Comitium was a work I saw in the Capitol that completely engaged with the ‘show don’t tell’ idea addressed in Visual Blueprint studio. When watching you simply follow a man riding his bike in the empty deserted Australian outback, when suddenly, he stumbles upon hooded figures who hand him an envelope. Only to realise this was all a dream, everyone in the audience jumped! Having no idea that this was the case and were just as scared as the man waking from his nightmare. The slow pacing and the open landscapes made this film feel empty in the beginning, just like a dream. You are trying to connect what is going on, and everything feels like it’s taking a while to get to the climax. Comitium simply awakens the audience and truly controls the story with the jump to the man waking from his so-called nightmare. The slow-paced beginning to the jump really takes you off guard, and it was a great experience of show don’t tell since none of us had a clue of what’s to come.
Decadence is a delicate film that highly focuses on the stylistic elements when it comes to the idea addressed in visual blueprint. It’s a stunning film, which is fitting as the film centres around a passionate artist who takes pride in delivering work to her subjects. When looking into the insights of Decadence, I realise the underlying messages being ‘conflicts experienced by young emerging creatives’ and can understand the correlation. A young artist who strives for perfection, looking for perfect subjects, yet fails to replicate them into visual art pieces. Like reality when we seek perfection when we try to emerge our creative ideas into reality.
From the studio, ‘The Scene in Cinema’, I engaged with the work produced by Kevin Sun named ‘Picture the Moment’. Watching the film, I understand the inspiration to recreate work from Studio Ghibli in a real-life context. The light colour and filter make the scenes of Melbourne looks flawless, full of light pastels and pops of saturation in the warm mid tones. Everything looked picture perfect which replicates the feeling of watching a Ghibli film. From the process, The Scene in Cinema’s key idea could be to replicate the style of a particular director or film company into your own work, what style inspires you. Kevin Sun states that they tried to use compositions like Ghibli films and reduce the amount of movement, as Ghibli is primarily an animation film company. Kevin Sun also discusses this theme to mimic animation process by having the shots feel purposeful and draw frame to frame of action. Sun states that they went along with their camera operator Joshua Devereaux to do photography to find locations that would work for the feeling of a Ghibli film.