Tagged: short film
Short film: Sisyphus
Having shot tests and short films on a variety of cameras, it was interesting and reassuring to return to shooting a short film with a familiar camera: my Fujifilm X-Pro-1.
While this model is now supplanted by superior updates, I enjoy using this camera for its manageable size, simplicity of control and terrific image capture, which served me greatly when shooting with it before.
The project this time was “Sisyphus”, a short film about an endless quest, which I shot on green spaces near my home in south east London.
As a filmmaker, I’ve been very interested in writing and directing dialogue-free stories: it was enjoyable to build a story with just sound and vision, and excluding words.
If I were to do it again, I would aim to record better sound. The in-camera microphone caught a lot of wind distortion. While the camera has no socket for an external microphone, I could have recorded clean atmosphere tracks with my digital sound recorder.
Editing in iMovie was enjoyable. While I have the rudiments down on this tool, I’d like to experiment more with sound post-production on future projects.
According to Zanah Thirus’ excellent and informative microbudget indie filmmaker’s podcast, the most welcome compression for festivals is an H264 compressed MP4 file. Getting to this with iMovie was difficult: for some reason, when exporting, my settings button didn’t show. It was sheer luck that I clicked on a certain part of a grey area on the export window that brought up the menu I was after.
I’ve been editing some other videos; mainly test shoots and home recording, but in every shoot and edit I have aimed to learn something. Whatever the mistakes or learns in this, I enjoyed this production and look forward to my next.
Realities
I’ve just completed a short film that I’d been working on for a few weeks.
“Realities” takes an idea from a science fiction feature screenplay I’m currently writing and imagines it in another setting. While I may not have brought complete clarity to the idea, I enjoyed making this short film and may rework aspects of the feature script as a result of making this.
Realities from Burning Details on Vimeo.
Two of my favourite aspects of this short film were building props and recording sound, the latter of which has been a problem in previous shoots. My next hope is to use more lighting, which I have also found difficult previously: short films offer great opportunities for experimentation.
Now “Realities” is complete, I’m going to make another short science fiction film, from a screenplay of about equal length. I have a few other ideas mulling around, as well as the opportunity to try some new editing platforms: I’ll see what new aspects I can bring to these productions.
New filmmaking
After making my environmental short, I have started work on a new short film.
I wrote the script some months ago, but put it to one side as I had started writing a feature screenplay that expanded on this short’s idea. As writing progressed, I returned to this short as I found myself more and more interested in playing with its ideas.
Although realising this short film is a daunting prospect, the shoot has been enjoyable so far, with props and shot set ups I haven’t used before. Where I think things will become complex is with the sound, which will be a huge part of this film.
In any case, I’ve greatly enjoyed the process. I’m looking on short films more as sketches or practice and I’m enjoying making as many as possible, on any media I can use. And the more I do it, the less daunting it will be.
The air around us
Following my WHO Health for All film festival entry, I decided to follow up on another idea I had for an environmental short film.
The idea was concerned with air pollution: I’d read news stories about people suffering respiratory illnesses near busy carriageways like the North Circular Road and Park Lane; also Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s case had been in the newspapers for some time.
On researching air pollution’s effects on the body’s organs, I depicted these with watercolour paints on a pristine white shirt, intercutting them with images of road traffic.
I enjoyed making some work around the subject of the environment, which is becoming ever more urgent as time progresses. As usual with any creative endeavour, there are many things that I’d do differently next time. Nonetheless, I learned a lot, which I hope to bring to my next short project.
WHO Health for All Film Festival
Late last year, I saw by chance that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was organising a short film festival.
The WHO Health For All Film Festival has been running for two years: this year, it requested short films on three possible categories. Universal health coverage, health emergencies, and better health and wellbeing were the topics on offer and I chose the first, as it was partially concerned with non-communicable diseases.
Having had personal experience of Alzheimer’s disease through family and friends, I made a film about this illness’ effects. I remember thinking that it was like having parts removed from something familiar, so I took my idea from there.
Alzheimer’s from Burning Details on Vimeo.
Recently, I received an email detailing the competition’s finalists. My film was not among them, but the shortlisted films displayed a standard of craft in storytelling, sound, photography, editing and design that I found wholly inspiring.
The craft of filmmaking is an ever deepening field. One of the many pleasures I get from making films is discovering more of it. I hope to bring some more of this craft to my work when I enter this competition next year.
Burning Details 
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