More Storyboards! - Experimental Film

Although I initially intended only to produce loose storyboards for Likeness, I have decided to go into further details with the drawings and to roughly sketch out the shots to appear in the film. This has helped me to 'edit' the film before shooting, cutting down the amount of time wasted in production and post-production.

The boards are subject to small changes, and some of the drawings aren't too accurate, but they do serve as a good reminder of intended shots and as a communication tool.

Casting Call for the Experimental Film

For Likeness, we will be requiring an actor to play the part of the protagonist. In order to find one, I have placed a casting call on Mandy.com, a website I highly recommend for getting hold of cast and crew, and one that I have used before to great effect. The listing is below:

Vacancy :	Likeness
Production Type :	Short Film
Country/State :	UK England/ Wales
Town or Area :	Sheffield
Start Date :	24/1/12
Duration of job :	3 days spread out over 2 weeks
Payment :	lo/no/deferred payment
Displayed for :	7 days ( = starts 16-Jan-12 and expires 23-Jan-12)
Company Name :	SHU
Contact :	Alex Withers
Responses :	Applicants will fill in a form, with the results sent to - this address will not appear on mandy.com .
Web Page :	http://www.mandy.com/home.cfm?c=wit061
Address/Fax :	(none)
Artist Contracts :	non-Equity
General Text :	Director: Alex Withers. Likeness is a short experimental film exploring the nature of photography and the way in which a separate reality is created by a photograph. Synopsis: A photographer become lost in the separate reality of her own photographs. Through a series of surreal explorations of time and space we question the truth that seems inherent in photographic images. This is a student film, shot around the central area of Sheffield and in Sheffield Hallam University itself. We are casting for the protagonist, a photographer overwhelmed by the weight of her work. LOCAL APPLICANTS ARE PREFERRED; This is an UNPAID role, as there is unfortunately no budget for the film, but will provide interesting showreel material, and if the film is successful there is potential for submission to experimental film festivals. Shooting dates are subject to change and so the ideal applicant will have a flexible schedule. However, preliminary dates are Tuesday 24th, Monday 30th and Tuesday 31st January.

Production Design update: Instant Photographs

In one of the scenes of Likeness, instant photographs are required to dress the set, in order to create what appears to be a mass of photographs that the protagonist must wade through. For the very top of the pile, prints are needed to sell the illusion that the pile is made entirely of photographs.

For this, I retrieved a number of public domain images, and using a Photoshop action acquired at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/20/the-ultimate-collection-of-useful-photoshop-actions/  each photograph was framed in a Polaroid-style frame. For this, I have to thank my girlfriend and her Photoshop wizardry for advising me on the quickest and most effective method to do this.

Below are a couple of the images, which will be ordered through Snapfish at a great bargain of 1p per print. I have primarily selected images which represent nature, in order to draw a contrast between the reality from which they were obtained and the questionable level of truth relating to how real these images in fact now are, as photographs. Secondly, to take it further, images were selected which purposefully could not in fact have been taken as instant photographs; a direct comment upon the reproducible and malleable nature of modern photography and the resultant questionable fidelity inherent in any given photograph.

Maya Deren's 'At Land', and its influence on our Experimental Film

Having completed a presentation on an article by Maya Deren for the Approaching Research module, I became familiar with the various concepts she deals with in her writings and the techniques utilised in her films. As part of the research process, Jordan and I also watched several of these works.
Among these was At Land, an experimental film using Deren's own technique of 'creative geography', linking separate locations together through cleverly-hidden transitions in order to create a continuous sense of movement through them. The protagonist (played by Deren herself) journeys across these scenes in a manner suggesting she is searching for something. The closing of the film reverses the order of these locations as she returns to the beginning scene of the film.
This sense of circular chronology appealed to me, and so I wrote Likeness with the intention of creating a similar loop in which the opening and ending of the film take place in the same location, and potentially at the same point in time.

A belief of Maya Deren's as argued in her writings, is that the photographic process results not in a capturing of reality, but the creation of an entirely new and separate one. The image is a representation of the mental process relating to what the viewer identifies as its subject, and the context in which it is viewed changes entirely its meaning. In this way, a cinematographer chooses aspects of reality to photograph that serve the purposes of their film and the meanings they wish to create. In At Land, this attitude is shown in the surreal blending together of carefully-chosen locations and scenarios, including a particularly surreal scene in which the protagonist crawls along a table, without drawing any notice from those sitting at it. Often throughout the film, an object (such as a chessboard) is used in order to link two locations together more cohesively and suggest no change in time but only a change in space.

In doing this, Deren exploits the unique ability of film to deal with time, and to represent time as required by the filmmaker.

In Likeness, we hope to channel some of these creative elements in order to produce our own piece of work that takes advantage of the qualities exclusive to filmmaking, and manipulates the viewer by using editing to alter real-life space in order to create an entirely new one existing only in the world of the film.

Experimental Film - Some Inspiration

When developing the initial concept for Likeness, some of the first sparks of inspiration came from a short documentary piece by Philip Bloom.
The below film was shot using the Sony NEX-5N, a Micro 4/3 camera that has joined the trend of HDSLR filmmaking despite not technically being a DSLR. Regardless of any limitations this small camera has in terms of creative control, Bloom has created a truly interesting and beautiful piece of work.

The opening shot was immediately one that appealed to me, and I wish to recreate it in our own upcoming film. From this, the idea of a story surrounding a photo booth stuck, and the rest of the film idea stemmed from this.
Once this was decided, the works and writings of Maya Deren were a massive influence, and the structure and style of Likeness was intended to reflect and comment upon some of the ideas and questions she raises about the photographic process.