Tuesday 22 May 2012

Three Short Films: How it was made

Looking into the possibility of changing the perception of a site through filmmaking and editing process, allowing the site to dictate the process of editing. Throughout the process, the desired outcome would be to create a ’mental space’ (dream) within chosen sites.
Discovering the effects of different filming techniques and how the relationship between camera and filmed object interact once the aspect of randomness is allowed.
The creation of three short film has allowed me to unravel these possibilities. Thee films were filmed in three different spaces with completely different atmosphere. the only common thing that these spaces have is a strong directionality to them, either vertical or horizontal. 

here are some photographs i took during the process of the making.



space for film 1: White-ness






Space for film 2: Sunset-ness





Space for film 3: Float-less






Limits. Short film

The aim was to create a film that would embody the dream experience. According to Gilles Fauconnier in his book ‘Mental Spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language’, mental space is a space of imagination, the imaginary space that the speaker refers to. So anything can be the mental space, if only the person can construct or recall it from the memory. And I have chosen the dream for my mental space at this stage. But as the dream experience is very personal, and true only for one person, I couldn’t avoid making a film very personal as well.
Reading Freud and his ‘Interpretations of dreams’, I found this idea: if a dream can be analyzed through recollection of the memories that have formed it, then it should be possible to form a dream through building the train of memories, that would have connection, and form an ‘artificial dream’.
I have used my personal recent memories to filter the ones, which would occur in my own dreams, and using them, I have recreated a dream that I could have had. Using the fear of height as the starting point, I have recalled places with the same feeling to it. I have looked at the fear of height not as a phobia, but as the strong restriction of the available ‘active space’, the space where it is possible to move. It could be argued that fear of heights is quite close to claustrophobia, if looking at it from this point of view. So this idea led me to the main theme for my film: exploration of the limits (both emotional, or attached to people, and physical).