Altered States - Short Film
- 20114328
- Nov 25, 2021
- 3 min read
Across Tuesday and Thursday, we had the option to choose between two workshops- one on filmmaking and one on concept design.
At first, I naturally gravitated towards the concept design option, seeing as it would be a fairly major aspect of the degree course I am looking at. However, I decided to go with the filmmaking option instead. My reasoning for this is because I want to try a bit of everything else while I have the opportunity, before I lock myself down to something more specific, like Games Art.
In the filmmaking workshop, we were put into groups of 4 or 5 (Mine was me, Arren, Frankie and Luke) and asked to make a short film inspired by either Man On Platform One by Jon Coley, or The Necromancers by Lindsay Seers. I have linked these two short films below.
Our short films could be as heavily or lightly inspired by these films as we liked, as long as we gathered our footage as a group and edited no more than 90 seconds of film each. When we asked about the maximum length, we were told that as long as each person in the group edited a section and the overall length didn't exceed 6 minutes, we could make one longer film. We decided that we could tell the best narrative with a longer film.
We decided that we wanted our film to be loosely inspired by Man On Platform One, in that we wanted to play with the viewer's perception of time, as well as the more obvious theme of a dead body appearing.
To play around with that 'altered state' of time, instead of our characters experiencing what the viewers perceive to be flashbacks, they would experience more of a flash forward- premonitions of what is to come. The film plays out across the perspectives of our four characters, with each perspective occurring at roughly the same time, which is why you see the same characters entering the same room multiple times. When each of these perspectives collide in said room, the scene hinted at by the flash forwards takes place. Each character was played in such a way that their moods could be interpreted in different ways by the viewer, aided by the tone of the background music, allowing the film to be seen in different lights.
Since we all needed to contribute during editing, I decided I would edit the section that was my character's perspective at the beginning of the film. In order to keep the entire film cohesive, we all gave our edited sections to Arren to string together and add the music to. I feel that this was a great opportunity to work in a team to create a film in such a way that it was reminiscent of teamwork within industry, while still being able to put a little bit of a personal stamp on it.
Above: Screenshot from Premiere Pro
Above: The final short film, credits to Zoe, Arren, Frankie and Luke
While I did enjoy working on this film, I must admit that it was rather stressful. I would have much preferred to have had more time to plan and prepare before we even started filming, rather than the short time we did have. We would have taken the time to create a decent storyboard, scout locations, focus on audio and hire out equipment such as a gimbal to eliminate camera shake.
An interesting storyline with a real build up in tension. Nice work!