Possible titles at the beginning of this process are

• My life is a song for you

• The man in red

• Smiling on us all

• The great death, and other everyday events

• The day I watched a man die

• What could I have done?

• The soul that slipped away

In 'My Life is a Song For You', it explores the different reactions to death through creativity. I love this idea, as well as Bertie Gilberts way of directing, so felt extremely inspired by this. I love the cinematography of this short film, especially the attention to lighting.

Rosenthal, T. (2020, 9th February) My Life is a Song For You. [Video]

Sharp, J. (2021, 30th September) the day i saw a man die. [Video]

LOGLINE: The story of Jaime exploring what death means to him, after experiencing a stranger dying in front of him.

GENRE: drama, surrealist, grief account

STATEMENT OF INTENT:

I have written this film to explore the taboo topic of grief, as death is often touched upon in film, but not the aftermath of how it affects a person. As someone who has experienced significant grief, I am fascinated by the journey of the deceased, but also the journey of those left behind. I want to create this film to show people, especially young people, that they are not alone in their grief and that grieving is valid in many circumstances, even if the person did not hold a significant role in your life. Grief is extremely complex and I want this film to remind people that there is no ‘perfect’ way to grieve.

SYNOPSIS / THREE ACT STRUCTURE (of the entire film):

Act One (0-5 min)

Jaime has watched someone die today, opens the door to his house, walks in and immediately crumbles to the floor in tears. He is coming to the realisation that this happens to us all. He is reassessing his idea of what death is. He lies in bed tossing turning thinking about the people that the person who died must have known and how none of them got to see him at the end.

 Act Two (5-10 min)

Jaime has fallen asleep at this point and is dreaming of different version of the afterlife. There will be one where he is in a dark room looking confused and concerned. He will be monologuing and bargaining towards the camera, he doesn't want to die and doesn't understand what is happening to him. There will be another scene in which he is surrounded by orange lights and is sitting at the table looking blankly. This will be in reference to the quote "I hope that death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child after a party, I hope you can hear laughter from the next room". This swaps between shots of his looking contemplatively at the table, and him dancing with his eyes closed as if no one is watching, adopting the attitude of life is short.

 Act Three (10-15 min)

He wakes up to a loud knock on the door, he rushes up and opens the door but no one is there when he opens it. There is just a box on the floor. On the top of the box it says "all the unexpressed love". This is a play on the quote that grief is just all the unexpressed love that we carry that now has nowhere to go. The box is empty however. We then see a montage of Jaime walking through a field during sunset with music flooding in the background, holding this box tight to his chest. He opens it and releases the so called leftover love. He sits alone in the field smiling as he has reached acceptance.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

The rating for this film will be a 15 rating, as it touches on some tough subjects and will contain some strong language, however, nothing graphic is shown or describes on screen. I would like this film to attract those who are curious about death, or those who have been through significant grief in their life, as I think this film would be understood and appreciated by this audience.

CHARACTERS

Jaime (21): A young boy who is desperately searching for where he fits in. He is quiet and keeps things to himself, after an upbringing of toxic behaviours being reinforced in him, such as not opening up about your emotions. Deep down though, he is highly sensitive and struggles to process this intense surge of emotions he feels when he witnesses a stranger die in front of him.

Michael (45): Never seen on camera. This is the man who passed away in front of Jaime. This character is not explored during the film, as Jaime did not know him and we are seeing this film from the perspective of Jaime.

I also got in contact with a camera operator who I know would have a similar surreal, arty vision to me. I also got in contact with a lighting operator, who again, has worked on more abstract projects, much like mine. I have messaged someone about doing sound for my trailer, but with an unclear response because of their availability, so I will contact more people for this element. I will also have an assistant producer on the shoot with me, to help out with log sheets.

My Life is a Song For You by Tom Rosenthal

I got myself a finish by Tom Rosenthal

Michaels Tree by Sammy Copley

Words by Gregory Alan Isakov

Heal by Tom Odell

You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen

Dennis Was a Bird by Tom Rosenthal

Blood by The Middle East

For You To Be Here by Tom Rosenthal

Middle of my Mind by Tom Rosenthal

On the Radio by Chip Taylor

I would also like to use a room on the seventh floor of the New Adelphi, as I have a vision of Jaime being in a completely dark room, as if he is a kind of suspended, dream like state between consciousness and death. These rooms are ideal because they allow for complete darkness as well as privacy.

Finally, I would like to use the meadow behind Peel Park as my third and final location. This would be fore when Jaime is walking around clutching a box with the words 'the unexpressed love' written on it. This use of nature, to me, represents the acceptance stage of grief.

For camera work, I also contacted someone who I had worked with previously who has experience using the new pocket black magic cameras. They also watch the same kind of indie films as me, so I knew that they would be able to portray my vision well.

I am struggling currently in terms of someone to operate my sound recording as my sound operator dropped out, but I have contacted multiple to possibly record for me.

In the first ten minutes, I got my group of five to line up and each say the line "what could I have done?" acting as different stages of grief. I found that I was not paying attention to the screen displaying the shots on it whilst the actor were acting, which is something I learned is essential to do. I found that using 5 people was difficult for me as I am not a natural leader, however, the actors did very well and showed their acting capabilities well. We did two takes in order for the actors to get feedback in-between (in which I said make the actions bigger.)

I then just worked with one classmate and asked him to perform a monologue that I had sent to him prior to the lesson in order for him to be able to rehearse. This is the monologue that I'm going to use in the trailer so I wanted to see how it would work and whether I needed to edit any of the lines. I got him to do two takes and gave him a lot of feedback in-between, such as embodying the anger of grief on the last line. He took this on really well and demonstrated this in the second take.

I think I personally warmed up to directing throughout the 20 minutes that I had. At first I felt a little apprehensive about being the leader in a situation and therefore felt much better with the one-on-one directing. I could improve on my communication of exactly what I want and being able to articulate my thoughts better.

For the scenes in the living room, I want to create a nostalgic, orange hue which will nod to the character of Jaime looking back over his life and reflecting. The orange lighting will also reference the idea of hoping that death is like coming home from a party as a child and being carried inside by your parents. The strange juxtaposition of this seemingly warm and comforting feeling, alongside the depressing nature of the scene will hopefully cause a sense of eeriness and unsettled nature.

The outside inspiration pictures I have included are for the scenes in the meadow where the character Jaime is running and in his acceptance stage of grief. I ideally want this to be filmed during sunset, because as sunset, to me represents new beginnings, as well as a closing of a chapter. Obviously we are filming in winter, so I see this vision as unlikely, but I will try to time my filming accordingly.

Finally, the shots in the white spotlight are for when Jaime is recounting a monologue in a strange dream-like setting and directly addressing the camera as if we are listening to his thoughts. The stark white will be bright to reflect his uncomfortably in this scene.

The second scene I wanted to shoot was a dancing sequence, where the actor begins to dance really freely, as if he is getting to the stage of grief in which he is realising how short life is. I imagined before this scene, the character had drank a lot and therefore the movements should be messy. To start this scene, we set up the camera and adjusted the lighting. We used a similar lighting to the scene before, as I wanted to show that this section was the same day as the last few shots. However, we added a pulsing white light, which we reflected off a silver reflector in order to mute this pulsing slightly in order to not effect the camera. This gave the slight illusion that there was some music on and Jaime was partying, and also gave some more dimension to the plain white wall that Matt was standing in front of. I then played the song "Blood" by the Middle East, which is possibly the song I want to use in my edit, and has a section near the end that I thought would be perfect for this dancing section. In order to make my actor feel more comfortable with this dancing scene, I got the crew and I to dance with him for a rehearsal take, which made him feel a lot more comfortable with dancing as if no one was watching. Much like the last shot, we started with a wide shot and then moved to a mid shot to get more detail in terms of facial expression. So for this section I was not recording sound, as there was no dialogue, so I played the last two minutes of the song and directed Matthew to start by building up to dancing slowly for about 20 seconds, and then as the song built up he went into more full on dancing with no care. In a couple of takes of this section I narrating exactly what Matt should do such as tilt his head one way, or smile slightly. This worked really effectively again, as this was a type of acting that the actor had not done before, so he needed an extra push in order to know what to do. However, for a couple of takes of this section, I told him to just dance as if no one was watching. I did this because I wanted to see exactly how he would personally act this as an actor. This meant that I got a lot more of a free response from him, so in my edit, I will use a mixture of both these takes. At the end of this dance section, I wanted Matt to slowly stop dancing as the character remembers the horror he has witnessed and the fact that the character of Michael will never be able to do this. I wanted to embody the guilt that comes with being happy and enjoying yourself during grief. So, for the last 10 seconds of each shot, I got my actor to slow down his dancing, in accordance with the music and start to think about this man, and imagine that the camera is Michael. This worked really effectively and I could see in my edit and I would probably use this as one of my last shots in one of trailers and possibly put it in slow motion.

Unfortunately we did not get to film all 6 shots that I wanted due to the camera person needing leave, but I was really happy with the 5 shots that I did get. I therefore timetabled my filming on the 27th in accordance with this extra shot to film. Overall, I think I settled into the role of director more and more as the session went on, and as I got into the mind of an actor and realised how I would feel in this situation, and instead of demonstrating this physically to the actor, I verbally described what emotions the character would be feeling at this time.

We then travelled to my student house, and were joined by our lighting designer and operator. I made sure that we all had adequate breaks during this time and purchased snacks for the cast and crew. We started with a hallway shot, which proved quite difficult for lighting. I initially wanted to try putting an aperture light in a bright blue shade, behind a window in the door, however I then did not like the look of this and we got rid of that idea. Instead, we put two aperture lights in the light-shade. Because one of the walls in the hallway is orange, it became hard to balance out this colour, so instead, we embraced it! The majority of my shots have either an orange or blue hue to them, so this actually worked quite well. We projected more orange onto the orange wall and blue onto the white wall, to created this illusion of conflicted thinking, as in this shot, the character is in shock and is beginning to process his emotions.

Once we had done multiple takes on this shot we moved down to the basement.

Here, we cleared the area and decided to use one corner, which is very dark. Unfortunately, I could not get the vision that I wanted, because my idea was to have one narrow spotlight on my actor and a dark background. I could not get this because the equipment store was running low of light stands, so could not provide me with the light that I wanted. So, instead, we troubleshooted by creating a cone made out of paper and held it over an aperture light. Although this didn't give me the vision I originally had, it helped to dull the light. Because we were shooting quite a dark scene, I made sure to warn my cast and crew every time I was turning off the lights, and fortunately, because it was a small space, there was no room to move around or trip. In terms of directing this monologue scene in the basement, I think the actor originally struggled to embody the emotions that I was requesting, so I made sure to take time to explain what the character was going through at this time, and we did multiple rehearsals takes. In order to get the result of the performance of the monologue I wanted, I embodied Rabiger's (2013) theory on relying on 'beats' to get an emotional and dramatic dialogue. To do so, we broke down the script into sections where the actor could pause and contemplate, and change directions with his acting. We finally reached a point where both of us were happy with the result of the acting in terms of minimal movement, and bold facial expressions. I was very impressed with the outcome in the end.

Rabiger, M., & Hurbis-Cherrier, M. (2013). Directing : Film techniques and aesthetics. (pg. 41) Taylor & Francis Group.

I first of all added an adjustment layer (LUT) in order to combat any milky-ness that I had in my raw footage. This corrected the footage and made it more bright and colourful. One part of editing that I was surprised to find difficult was the audio editing, as I am usually quite comprehensive with this because of doing editing on Adobe Audition. However, this did not translate well into Premier Pro, so I watched multiple YouTube videos about editing sound, which made it much easier. I also inserted the song 'Seasonal Hero' by Orlando Weeks, which is a song centred around death, so was appropriate for this film. To do this I found a website that would convert a YouTube video into a WAV file and imported into the trailer. I also stabilised one of the handheld clips in this sequence, as if was far too shaky and this stabilisation made it look more uniform with the rest of the shots.

When editing my second trailer, I struggled because I had a vision of using the second half of the song 'Blood' by the Middle East in the second half of the trailer, but couldn't find a song that worked with the first half of the trailer, I initially used the first half of 'Blood' for this first section, however, this did not work because the song was too joyful and I wanted more of a contrast between Jaime's initial sad and shocked emotions, compared to the kind of carpe diem emotions he feels in the second half of this trailer. So instead I used the song 'Heal' by Tom Odell. This worked a lot better, and in order to make the songs transition better, I had to put the song 'Blood' down a semi-tone using a pitch shift, in order for the songs to both be in B flat key. Once I had connected the clips I wanted to use with the song, I concentrated on colour grading. I went through each clip and adjusted how they looked, and tried to match it with other clips in the same setting. This helped me to make stark contrasts in colour between the clips. I then added text over the top of the trailer. Once this was done, I decided to make the first two clips of this trailer, which have text over them, look out of focus, which made the shots of Matthew look even more striking.

East, T. M. (2009) Blood. [Song]. Spunk Records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7SSC3ex-bA

Odell, T. (2013) Heal. [Song]. Warner Chappell North America Limited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prsRiVTKqYg

Therefore, after watching the video, I moved on to the ethics risk assessment, which I read through and signed. I then filled out the data protection checklist. My actor then signed an ethical consent form, as well as my lighting designer, as they are not on the Media and Performance course. Finally, I completed the block approval consent form.

During the process of this film, I have thoroughly enjoyed the creativity that came along with doing an individual project. When coming up with the idea for the film, and creating a treatment plan, I enjoyed the creative freedom. As someone who would like to go into producing, I found the pre-production paperwork an easy task. I am normally a very last-minute person, so I did my best to space out when I was doing this paperwork in order to get it done in time for production.

DURING PRODUCTION

Although I had always enjoyed producing over directing, I have recently had some external experience directing and realised that I enjoy it a lot more than I thought. My initial and instinctual technique was to tell my actor a brief of what was going on in the shot and then after they had rehearsed it, tweak bits and pieces until I was happy. I did this to try and give the actor freedom to express their own emotions and choices. However, I soon realised that this technique was not particularly productive and took a lot more time and effort than it needed to. My actor was also slightly apprehensive and unsure about the emotions I was trying to convey to the audience, because this type of sad acting was new to him. So, instead of my previous approach, I decided to describe fully the emotions that the character was going through, as well as instructing where his hands should go, and how his facial expression should look. This technique, along with the actor asking questions worked really well and saved a lot of time. I did find it quite hard to keep up with the continuity sheets when I had to step up to camera-person when the original camera-person could no longer make the second shooting day, so if I were doing this project again, I would hire an assistant producer who would keep on top of the continuity sheets.

POST-PRODUCTION

As someone who is not confident in editing, this section of production really intimidated me. So, I watched many YouTube videos of people using premier pro software and picked up some lessons. I found editing quite stressful and difficult, as I found it hard to get my original vision across. However, in the end I was happy with the result of my editing, although I think if I were to do the project again, I would start to edit my trailer a lot earlier than I did and try to be more consistent with delegating time to the edit. Although the edit is not particularly fancy or complicated, I think a lot of the shots speak for themselves, and reinforce the kind of stillness that I wanted to bring to the trailer.