When I began planning my experimental film, I came up with a few different ideas one of which was a play in which the two actors start off happy, but the scene keeps randomly changing and their mental state progressively worsens as they become helpless and are unable to stop the scenes from changing. This was intended to be a reflection on how the theatre industry can be incredibly demanding often pushing actors to breaking point leaving them with no way out. After playing around with ideas I eventually stuck with my current one in which a man wakes up with a marking on his hand and consumes ‘the fruit of life’ and meets a familiar looking ghost shortly before his world ends right back where it started.
When planning this project, I mainly used the notes app in my phone to log any details I wished to include when I got around to shooting as well as using my notepad to make rough sketches and short storyboards.
Filming was very tough as there were two actors on screen (myself and my friend Josh who volunteered to play ‘the ghost’) I had to find people with short notice to help me film but I also didn’t want to take up much of their time so shooting day was fairly quick so I was unhappy with a few of the shots I ended up getting, but in terms of pre-production everything went smooth, I found a bed sheet to use as a ghost costume after looking on Pintrest for reference, I got some string and sticks to create a ‘makeshift’ grave too and a few other bits such as apples and staples for the ‘corpse’ scene.
When filming wrapped, I was finally able to edit but had a few issues as I hadn’t used premier pro to much during my time at university but after a few hours of online tutorials and research I managed to edit together my experimental film to a standard I was happy with, I added filters to my footage as well as colour balanced it and added transitions and cuts to make it flow better. When I finished the edit and had the final cut of my film, I was able to identify what I needed to do to improve if I ever came back to it in the future.