Gestalt: Project

What is it about?
This project was focussed on the surreal and what is it in film that makes something surreal. We were shown some information on Gothic and Poetic Cinema - SURREALISM.

 This is an example of a surreal film, this is an image from the animated film "Corpse Bride" and it was directed by Tim Burton. Tim Burton is an american film director and specialises in dark quirky themes movies. He also directed Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (2005), Sweeny Todd (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), all featuring actor Johnny Depp.

They are all films that have a sense of dreams/nightmares and they all have the gothic colouring. Although you may think that Charlie in the chocolate factory would be a happy film like the first one, the way it is set and the colours that are used make it seem very harsh and gothic. One of his influences for his work was Edgar Allan Poe who is a Gothic story writer, who focussed on the questions of death and decomposition. Another is Stephen king, who wrote books based on horror, suspense. science fiction and fantasy fiction. The films that I have mentioned are based around horror and fantasy fiction mixed into one. I they are more of one than the other but they have hints of both in there. Sweeny Todd being more horror and Alice in Wonderland being more about fantasy. 


What did we do?

We went on a trip to Mount Edgecome in plymouth and this is where we filmed our dream sequence. The project is mad up of two parts the dream sequence being one and then the normal being the other.

Dream Sequence

The dream sequence had to be out of the ordinary and surreal and the example we were given was alice in wonderland so we decided to go with that. We thought about what the place looked like and we decided that our theme for this would be symmetry. We also thought about characters and how we could make it into a dream and story. In Alice and wonderland Alice is searching for this bunny that had all the answers, so we took that and made the dream into a chase. The dream sequence had to connect with our other sequence so we thought a chase would be good.

Filming:
Filming went really well, the idea changed quite a bit over the course of the day and as we saw things around us we thought "oh this would be good" and "what if we did this?" which was bound to happen while we are walking around a location we hadn't seen before. Over the course of the day if we saw something we thought would look good we would just film it anyway and then that way we didn't want to use it it didn't matter but if we did then at least it was there, if we just stuck to the script the whole time the project wouldn't have looked as good.
To give it more of a surrealist feelwe used a green screen and we filmed arms and legs doing robotic movements so that they can come out of the ground and move around.

Editing:
Editing for part of the sequence took hours. There is one part that was a lot of different effects and we wanted holes and legs coming out of the floor and people floating on hands.

Normal Life:

This sequence had only one rule... to follow the pace of the following film:

This scene shows a girl running in and out of different rooms trying to find something or someone. At the end of our sequence we had to have the girl hit her head. This idea connects to the dream sequence because in normal life she is scared and running away from something and looking for something, in the dream she is trying to find the bunny.

Filming:
Filming went really well, it was alot easier than the dream sequence and it was filmed in the order that it would be seen. We filmed a walk/scared run going up the stairs then into a room where the girl would pass out on the bed. For this sequence we had some coloured circles that we would post up on the wall and we decided to make them into a countdown. They were stuck around the house in really unobvious places, not really in your face but still there in the shot. They were featured in the main sequence and then we got short cutaways of hands on the railings and short snappy close ups.

Editing:
Because we filmed it in order it was really easy to edit. We took about 3 takes of each scene so all we really needed to do was choose, trim and then put it all together. I like that we did it this way because it saves a lot of time and effort at the end of the day.

Alice from Robert Marshall on Vimeo.

Conclusion:

I think the videos worked really well both seperately and together. I liked how they both turned out and also how it was all filmed. it was a really fun project to film and I think it was one of the best films we have made as a group. It was also one of the most complicated but that is what made it so interesting.