Experimental film progress

The Soundscape

Picture taken with iPhone instagram in Crookes, Sheffield.

Experimenting with a Marantz sound recorder

A range of sounds were recorded around Sheffield, the idea of the experimental film is to show the binary opposition between civilisation (city) and nature, how both of them clash together with connotations of the inevitable human life cycle. Tom Cunningham and I decided that we will split the roles in this production, I will be in charge of the Director/Writer/Sound producer side of this short film whilst Tom is in charge of the cinematography and film editing. Both of us will be mixing jobs as well to get it on the right track. An actor was found using the Facebook drama group which was an absolute necessity. At the beginning, we used a Marantz and recorded sounds of ice cubes in a cup, door slamming, food wrappers, leaves rustling, car engines, hydrophone in a fountain, people talking and all this is edited with the experimental sounds I created with Thumbjam that was uploaded on soundcloud to show my progress. 

This is the progress so far on Soundcloud and Soundtrack Pro:

The experimental film circulates around the idea of:

The premise encapsulates the message I am trying to evoke in this experimental film. The ideology of a human bored of living, not suicidal but one that despises mortality. An intuitive logical introvert, an unhealthy rational thinker that is unhappy with his life and has a realisation that he should seek for the opposition. He works in an office and has to wear a suit everyday, gradually in the film, it shows the character slowly transferring himself from the office environment into nature, his appearance also changes when this happens. The character is a protagonist that switches roles to an antagonist (himself) that forms a disdain for technology, a neo-Luddite that suffers from neuroticism and self-deprecation. This idea is also inspired by the film Holy Mountain (1973).

I replaced the word 'chill' with 'ill' and the phrase 'My inevitable death and disintegration makes me fucking ill' should be inserted into the narration at the end of the film, to describe his situation. This is when the character is seen meditating in front of a small broken mac desktop computer (my friend has one) and he is seen wearing a pink wig, fake eyelashes, rags in a lotus position and somewhat burying the mac computer in a forest. I bought some black food colouring that could intensify the aesthetics of him vomiting black goo. This was inspired from the unpleasant Begotten (1990), an experimental horror film about Genesis, I will critically analyse this film in later posts comparing it to Ballet Mecanique (1923-4) as well.

How the Neo-Luddite idea was shown with props:

I used a broken mac keyboard, an old rusty hammer, fake blood, tomato and a paintbrush.

Behind the Scenes (Iguana) from Phoebe Jaspe on Vimeo.

This is roughly a moment of the film which would be edited in fast cuts where the protagonist murders the keyboard and the insanity is also shown when he plugs the keyboard into a tomato. The mania is captured with close-ups of the protagonist's enraged face along with the violent smashes of the keyboard. It also shows that he is restless of the situation and hopes to find a place that he could be reborn into. Since he is neurotic, this will make perfect sense in the character's mind.