The first runner up is a the short movie entitled Pillars. As you might recall, the location for this one was the passage between the castle and the multi-level car park that Alex has spoted. Initially, the location was meant for a remake of the Package shot we did during our first one-shot seminar. It was at the end of a tiring day, and the guys didn`t seem very keen to redo the whole choreography of the scene, so inspiration struck me when I saw the pillars on site and I put on my Melies hat and tried out a morphing act. The idea and possible story behind the scene were both very vague, but the trick could be used for its symbolism and that meant it had some serious potential, at least from my point of view.
And that is exactly what came through in the final editing. Whenever you have actors performing relatively simple actions, in this case, walking, it seems that there is a very good chance of giving that action a symbolic value. Why? Because the more complex a routine becomes, the more spaces are filled in with details by the viewer, the more specific that action becomes, and it ends up being...disenchanted. It`s like magic: the minute the audience knows the whole procedure of the routine and the actions you are going to perform and why you are going to perform them, they lose interest.
The basic idea of the scene can be outlined through a few keywords: journey, metamorphosis, experience, apotheosis. I have chosen to represent each stage in the story by what I thought would be a befitting verse. There is a parallel drawn with the Plato`s allegory of the cave. We find ourselves part of a group, a micro-universe, a garden that we call home and cherish for all its shortcomings. We cling to it, and find ourselves striken with nostalgia if we get to leave it behind and find ourselves confronted with new worlds because the garden offers us security, one of the most basic human needs. It also disturbs our idea about what we know. During high-school, my mathematics teacher came into our class, draw a small circle on the blackboard and said: `The contour of this circle, is the area of contact with what you saw as the unknown, the yet-to-be-discovered when you were 6 years old`. Then, he drew around it a bigger circle: `This is you when you are about to finish high-school. As you can see, the area of contact with the unknown has grown. So, basically, we are making it harder for you...`. Well, yes indeed. Back to our shot, this is where we get the juxtaposition of the previous image of our world, the `majestic pillars` and the shock and sometimes horror of realising how petty, small-minded the garden we have cherished really is when one takes a step outside of it. Compare that to the prisoner who has gone out of the cave and sees the forms that actually created the dancing shadows on the cave`s walls. And finally, apotheosis...because we all like a happy-end, don`t we? Don`t regret nor despise the past and what you have left behind, internalise the lessons and continue your journey (yep, there is another one, and another one and another one ahead).
This is the Story board :
When editing, I decided to use duochrome, focusing on greys and purples. For one thing, these two colours appear in the verses I used as subtitles, and also, again, when going for the symbolic, less is indeed more. The reason is fairly simple. Symbols are simple because they have to appeal to people, and to do that, they have to be stripped of the many nuances and details that one actually finds in real life...to cut a long story short, they are abstractions of barely sketched ideas that sound familiar to all of us. The music is part of the late 90s action-adventure game Outcast. It matches with the development of the action and given the fact that I`ve used a verse from Dante`s Inferno and the track is called Heaven in Adelpha, it was just a nice paradox. Here is the video...
The second video is a DOS adventure games nostalgia. What I basically tried to do, is to create a scene from a game called `The Meeting`, with loading screens, menus, MIDI soundtracks, sprites, cluncky and funny looking animation, pixelated backgrounds, a reduced pallete of colours, subtitles instead of voice-over, a bit of a story line to it and playing around with the cliches of the genre. How did it all work? Well, for once, I`d wish Premiere wouldn`t smoothen the movements of the characters. I was thinking whether reducing the frame rate would have been a good idea to re-create the robotic movements of the characters, but I`ll try that some other time.
The footage I used was part of the CCTV idea. Alex was in charge with the camera and coreography on this one, and I picked one of the four takes we did. The location for this one was a tunnel leading to Broadmarsh bus station. All the rest of us were involved in the scene as actors in some of the scenes, but in this scene, Umar is the only actor. The other character in the video is `an innocent by-stander` I`ve incorporated into the shot.
And here is the video. Enjoy!
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