Illustrated Essay

Intention

My creative intention is to produce a film about the breakdown of a relationship. I will employ an inner monologue given by the protagonist, to create the impression of someone who is verging on mental instability. The story climaxes to a point where we then learn that the antagonist has realised the error of her ways, but is it too late?

Influences

Film makers and artists who I am influenced by are directors Christopher Nolan, Ken Loach, the ‘kitchen sink’ drama movement and social realism movement. This combination of influences means that my creative intention is to blend a fusion of styles not previously integrated before and to create a more stylised take on 21st century realism cinema.

British-American director Christopher Nolan began his early film career with his father’s Super8 camera and began film-making at the tender age of seven. Nolan is "… a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid, Alien, Blade Runner just blew me away…”; Nolan’s desire to create a sense of another world with narrative threads that bind reality and hyper-reality together in unison can be seen in his first short film ‘Doodlebug’. The influence behind the film was to “…show the preoccupation with narrative boundaries” which Nolan would later explore in his feature films such as ‘Insomnia’ and one of his most popular feature films ‘Memento’. .” I want to make use of Nolan’s interesting narrative work, I want to develop my own version of narrative flow to go against the conventional narrative styles available in cinema; by toying with the rate of exposition involved and giving the audience an insight into the human subconscious, this has inspired me to push the boundaries in how I present my narrative to the viewing audience.
Nolan’s early beginnings in cinema allowed him to learn conventional film techniques. However, one of Nolan’s signature techniques is prevalent to his use of unconventional narrative structure; an example of this is in Memento, which shows Nolan presenting events in reverse-chronological order and then in chronological order. Using this technique, Nolan forces viewers into the mentally-impaired, skewed protagonist's position – which also displays disoriented events within the film’s narrative. Nolan had developed this cutting technique in Following, by presenting the structure in which the three acts are cut together, whereas Memento presents two linear timelines — the primary one running backwards, and an entirely previous timeline running forwards — which are cut together and which meet at the end.
This crossing-over is signified by the transition from black and white film to color as the timeline transitions from forwards to backwards. This use of colour constrast will form the basis for my transition between the reality and the skewed, somewhat dark imagination of my protagonist – as this will act as a visual code for the development of the character’s mental activity in tandem with what is actually happening in real life.
Nolan has been quoted explaning his method of exposition; “…I try to tell a story the way a conversation naturally unfolds. Or the way newspaper stories are written. It's not chronological. It takes about 20 minutes to get into a story. I attempt to teach the audience the structure…for me; you need to give people time to find their footing before you start jumping around”. Because of the limitation of time for my short film, naturally my exposition will need to be more rapid but I do want to retain the element of the unknown right up until the climax of the film – this will help let the audience make their own assumptions of the film’s plot while maintaining a sense of perspective. I am also inspired his method of story exposition; this sense of a world ‘inside of somebody’s head’ is the basis of my film and one of the strongest narrative themes present.

Nolan’s visual style is somewhat more conventional by using classic cinematic devices; a number of Nolan’s early films were shot in black and white, and because of his colour-blindness, he found them very visually appealing. “Yes, I'm colorblind, so that would be nice. Actually, I think it has to be the right story. If you do some color and some black and white, I think your appreciation for black and white is always being refreshed“.
Elements of my short film will be shot in black and white because of my personal fascination with the style, as well as the use of contrast between colour and B&W to show a difference or development in the narrative.
Another director I am influenced by is kitchen sink drama director Ken Loach whose works exposed the reality of socialistic problems such as homelessness, poverty and the exclusion of the working class. As a young man he directed a live television drama for the BBC, Diary of a Young Man, which enabled him to see the possibilities of breaking the conventions of film, by getting out of the studio and onto the streets – this allowed the use of handheld cameras and the lack of a script. British filmmakers like Loach channeled their anger into film using relatively less expensive 16mm cine-cameras. This resulted in a recognizable visual style and quality to the film produced and when shooting my short film, I want to reference the use of consumer video camera products like the original ‘Angry Boys Movement’ used in their iconic films, to further portray the realism elements.
Loach’s Diary of a Young Man also used non-naturalistic elements, such as stills sequences, cut to music with narration, in its attempt to achieve a new kind of narrative structure and I intend on including similar elements in my short film to bridge the gap between reality and production.
Loach became a pioneer of the British New Wave genre and is still held in high regard. Loach profiles part of the biggest influence behind the development of my story, to create a 21st century homage to Loach’s style; his use of ‘as real as it gets’ filmmaking makes the characters believable and in turn, relatable. Loach’s work is characterised by a particular view of realism, in which he strives in every area of filmmaking to portray genuine interaction between actors, to the point where some scenes in his films are completely unscripted. To further the realism Loach commonly casts unknown talent than method actors, as he prefers unknown talents who have had some of the actual life experience of the characters they portray, or subject they are exploring through the film’s narrative.
Examples of how this is used include in his film Bread and Roses, where he cast the two leading actors because of their background of living as an immigrant in the UK. By filming the story chronologically and occasionally not being shown the script until a few minutes before the filming, this allows for spontaneity within scenes which can make somewhat trivial scenes poignant and bring a whole new meaning to the simplest of tasks. This is a method of direction that I may try to implement in the shooting of my film, to create a sense of spontaneity and to try to obtain genuine interaction from the cast.
Loach commonly tells only some of the actors will know what is going to happen in a scene – in a bid to encourage the others to express genuine surprise or sadness because they really are affected by the events of the scene.
Two examples of this include in Kes, where Billy Casper discovers bird at the end, believed that the director had actually killed the bird that he had become quite close to during the filming, where in fact he had used a dead bird found elsewhere – and in Raining Stones one of the actresses visited at her house by a loan shark had no idea that he was going to force her to take off her wedding ring and give it to him as part payment.
This style of emotional manipulation means that the characters are believable and are more easily connected to their cast and in turn, the viewing audience. It is crucial to my film that my characters are as real and believable as possible, other wise the realism element could be somewhat redundant. It will be this, accompanied with my intention of a unique visual style directly influenced my Loach, that will form the epicenter of my short film. An example of Loach’s work that is influential in its method of conveying emotion is one of the opening scenes in Ken Loach’s Kes, where we see the protagonist Billy Casper dealing with his mundane childhood in a small Yorkshire town, where Billy is destined to a life of work in the coal mines as underachiever in school and a general delinquent; delinquent with a heart as he discovers an unlikely passion for falconry. His life involves smoking cigarettes, swindling money and a paper round - where he steals milk from milk floats. His life is somewhat normal for a boy of his age and of his class and the way Loach portrays this is through the bleak backdrop of the miner’s town in which he lives. In a scene after Billy is seen talking to a milkman, we see him walking onto a part of hilly wasteland over-looking the mine that his brother is currently working in. This dark, industrial image is then filled with colour when Billy begins to read a ‘Dandy’ comic; this iconic image shows the reality of his life – childish joy overshadowed by an impending commitment to work for the rest of his life. This particular sequence conveys the grim reality of the realm he lives in, exactly what Loach wanted to achieve.
I am influenced by Loach’s method of conveying a sense of emotional reality and from this I want to pay homage to the method of displaying the reality of Billy Casper’s life, by showing my characters for what they are in front of a backdrop of day-to-day life to ensure that the characters are believable, approachable and the scenarios liveable.

British New Wave is the name given to a style of filmmaking among directors in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s which had a direct link to social realism and kitchen-sink drama. The trend is a development of French New Wave, the term first applied to the films of directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard amongst others.
Their political views were initially labeled as radical and sometimes even anarchic, and they described social alienation of different kind. This involved art being non-superficial and a complete contrast from, for example, classic Hollywood style cinema – as social realism portrayed real life situations and the underbelly of some of those situations, where as traditional cinema would shy away from such negative attributes.

This movement would then later transpose and develop because of artists such as John Bratby, who founded the ‘kitchen sink’ style. Bratby's expressionistic style became known as "kitchen sink realism" after a painting of his which depicted a kitchen sink. David Sylvester, a British critic wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent British art and Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among modern painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the triviality of life. Bratby went onto paint several kitchen subjects, often turning practical utensils such as sieves and spoons into semi-abstract shapes. His style forms the basis of the majority of the mise en scene I intend to feature in my short film, but with a 21st century modernisation to the traditional genre; day-to-day life with normality and triviality in mind, no detail too small to highlight.

Conclusion

Each one of my influences has elements of their work that I am influenced by; from Christopher Nolan I want to take his unique storytelling techniques and his use of using visual and graphic differences between his ‘real’ world and his character’s imagination.
I then intend to combine this with influence from Ken Loach, where I will be utilising some of his methods of creating realism within a film. This includes his technique of filming, from the quality of film he uses to his camera angles and techniques (including static shots, continuous tracking shots etc.); all of these will play an influential role in stylising my short film to create a 21st century version of how Loach’s films could possibly look today. As social realism art has influenced me as well, the mise en scene of my short film will be important in order to convey to the audience that where the story is situated is believable and naturalistic.

These three influences, combined with the British New Wave movement being an influence in the sense of trying to create a film that tries to retain as much reality within cinema, set me in good stead to create my film and tell its story.

Shooting script

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