Insight Behind The Film
The Essay was a solo film I created to artistically depict one of the most common task that any student in the education system has had to carry out: writing/typing an essay. Being that collaboration with other people was not possible due to the pandemic, I had to complete this project solo. One character, one setting. The concept I came up for this short film was: a protagonist going through extraneous and tedious means in order to complete his essay but to ultimately fail. I pondered on how the failure would happen or what the failure could even be. I decided to incorporate a twist that served in the detriment of the protagonist. The twist serves to be a kind of filmic slap to the face towards the audience in how the sense dread starts to fill in at the end. This film demonstrates that having a tragic character can make a rather simple story have strong impact to the ending.
Dynamic Close-ups
I implemented varying degrees of close up shots in order to avoid having repetitive or unpleasant compositions of my bedroom which had limited spots to film and is rather too small for dynamic film compositions. Most shots were actually shot with my camera in one hand capturing either my face or my other hand doing actions.
The Red Lighting
There are important meanings behind the sequence where the protagonist aggressively types his essay in the dark. For these scenes, I wanted to convey the look of a madman. To effectively sell the essence of a heightened hysteria: I used one point lighting to display the sense of isolation; I chose the color red for the lighting to highlight the feeling of aggression/ anger towards his actions. The red lighting also conveys the feeling of anxiety and danger giving the an antagonistic essence to the essay assignment itself.
