The first thing I struggled with was coming up with a project at all, and scripting went through mutliple developmental stages:
The first thing I did in preparation for this project was looking for inspiration. I loved working on the Team Noir shoot and seeing their elaborate lighting setups and decided I wanted to do something similar. An odd thought because I had never had any interest in the genre, and even visually it never really stood out as something that I wanted to incorporate into my own work.
Alas I knew that I needed to start from some kind of visual basis because as has been the problem all year - I have no idea what story, or even what kind of story, I want to tell. I also saw the video essay below and thought Orson Welles' style was fantastic:
Of course it isn't all credited to Welles, I looked into the cinematographer as well:
For a short period I was really interested in the man behind the camera - Welles himself. He has such an interesting career and to see him go from the boy genius who couldn't do wrong to the crazy filmmaker out of Europe who never finished his films is very interesting.
But before looking at any of this I rented three of his films with the intention to see what I could pull from them and hopefully find inspiration for my own work, the films were:
Citizen Kane
The only one of Welles' films that I've actually seen, it also happens to be one of the most prominent in the video about his cinematography and for good reason. A lot of what makes Welles' style his own is established in this film and changes later on in his career. The presence of ceilings, the depth in the frame and sheer scale of every shot are all best displayed here.
Touch of Evil
This was a kind of director for hire situation where Welles was adapting something for someone else without much passion for it himself. It is very Noir though, probably the most of the films that he directed.
The Trial
Movies like this Brazil and The Double (2013) are part of a sub-genre that I really like. The characters are stuck in a system that they can't control but from which they wish to escape.
The best compliment I can give The Double is how it makes sense of things that leading up to the resolution seem unimportant.
In this interview the director says that they had to somehow wrap up the story and come up with an ending that even the writer of the novella Fyodor Dostoevsky couldn't come up with a satisfying resolution.
The novella ends with the main character being carted away to a mental asylum, the kind of ending that technically is a resolution but which feels empty and kind of like the author cheated. Yes the character was crazy all along. The movie does something different that makes the ending feel more earned and plays with the rules of the world. It is a satisfying conclusion because the character had to work for it and overcomes his weaknesses. In the novella the character doesn't get anywhere and doesn't change, at the end he is worse off than where he started.
Link to Novella: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72d/chapter1.html
It sounds cliche, but seeing a character develop and learn is very satisfying. It's something I think about a lot, and doubt the validity of, but the truth is that when I see a film like The Double I enjoy it more exactly because the character progresses.
To clarify I struggle with the concept of characters changing as being a good storytelling technique because when I try to write it myself it seems obvious and cheap. Why should people care when they know how the story will unfold? Maybe the reason The Double works is because it takes a similar approach as The Trial, with the story seeming not to really go anywhere and almost like a plot twist reveals that the characters do actually change and have an effect on their world.
Dostoevsky is another author I looked at because of how similar The Double seems to be to The Trial and other such stories. I thought that the two authors might have a similar approach to storytelling, it is in researching Dostoevsky that I found he is very different though.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DOSTOEVSKY AND KAFKA
IDEA 1: THE TRIAL ADAPTATION
Kafka's Book: http://www.kafka-online.info/the-trial.html
The first 20 or so minutes of the film had me trying to solve this puzzle and figure out what was going on, I came to a theory and excitedly waited for it to play out. Only later down the line did I realize the film had nothing in particular to say or anywhere to go, the set-ups at the start were never going to be paid off.
But I still had my idea of the film that would be in my head and though why the hell not adapt that:
What I found worked so well in The Trial is that the opening scene immediately hooks the audience. A man enters uninvited, far too early in the morning and the main character acknowledges this and yet can extract no information from the stranger. It's a good set-up that would work wonderfully for a short film, especially with one that is limited to two people in a room.
The book is very different to the script as it oft happens, the book is much busier with more people around the apartment and it doesn't have the same line of inquiry about the main character's female neighbour, which was kind of from where my idea originated. For these reason I chose to adapt the script more so than the original book.
Link to script: https://cinephiliabeyond.org/trial-orson-welles-exhibition-paranoia-illogicality-personal-responsibility-take-kafkas-classic/
MY IDEA
When I was watching The Trial I started piecing together puzzle pieces that didn't exist. I thought that the whole thing must be a dream, a dream of someone who obviously has a guilty conscious. The line of inquiry suggests that the man's insecurities and secrets are specific to his female neighbour Miss Bursnar. When I was watching this I thought that it would be cool if the inspector was probing into K's mind to find out the truth of a crime that K is accused of. The actual Trial is happening in the real world and K is under scrutiny after being accused of a crime that he will neither admit to or that can be factually proven.
But what kind of crime like this exists?
Of course back when the film was made I don't know what they would have chosen, but something that is quite prevalent now and something that would fit perfectly with the Inspectors' questions about Miss Bursnar - as well as K's odd relationship with her - would be the accusation of rape. It is a relevant issue now and if it were to say become more serious then in a fictional world people would devise a way to find out whether or not a guy accused of rape actually did it.
So this was the basis of my idea. Communicating this proved immediately difficult. I liked that at the start we don't know exactly what's going on, just as K in the dream wouldn't. There was also the resolution to consider - I liked the idea but wouldn't go ahead with it if there was no where for the story to go. I think I thought of a good conclusion that wouldn't have affirmed or denied whether K is actually guilty - staying true to the source material - but which would still give the story a satisfying conclusion in which the protagonist makes a choice.
The idea is that K is living through the a memory of the day on which the alleged rape occurred and he's been put under close surveillance so that the inspector can confirm whether or not he's guilty. A ticking clock device is present here as the middle of K's day is taken up by work so the deed occurs at night.
The resolution is that when he learns the truth, which he does throughout the day, he refuses to engage in the memory and goes back to sleep. Not wanting to know whether he's guilty. As expected the inspector just sends him back to the start of the day, K refuses to play the game and decides that it wouldn't be the worst thing to live this day over and over again as it really was a pretty good day.
I tried going for bittersweet ending. The enjoyment from his day would come from the conversation he has with his neighbour in the morning and his choice to not find out is because he can't imagine actually being guilty of the things he's been accused of. I think the ending works on other levels - for one it feels like an active choice and ultimate victory for the protagonist, almost a way of outsmarting the inspector.
I found during the creation of this story in my head I incorporated many different artists, not just Welles and Kafka. The concept being not dissimilar to Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I imagined the more surreal segments later on in the film having that David Lynch touch.
Of course the other great thing about the opening scene to Welles' The Trial is that the dialogue is wonderfully written and very entertaining to listen to. It's something present in a lot of old films and this made me realize that this could be a way to go for my scripts. After all why should people talk naturally in a heightened medium like film? The sophistication present in the dialogue of older films (like those from the 50's and 60's) is no longer around and considering it's just a film and considering that actors would love to say these lines I decided to also return to a more classical style of talking in my writing.
OLD TIMEY DIALOGUE
One of my favourite movies is It's A Wonderful Life (1946) which one an Oscar for writing. The reason for it's success is two-fold:
1) It's efficiency
Like all great films the movie is very succinct and every scene has a reason to be there and every detail sees reincorporation in some form. Upon each reviewing of this film I realize just how tightly written it is.
I think the problem with this for me, now, is that all this reincorporation and foreshadowing isn't applicable to the short film format. To write efficiently in this manner one has to have enough space for setup and pay-off and that's something that doesn't happen in just 10 minutes. The outline I had for this first idea was for a 30-40 minute film, still short but certainly not short enough to be done in one scene. And that's one of my greatest problems with this first idea, but I'll discuss that further down the line.
2) It's wonderfully entertaining dialogue
I think one of the effects of having this kind of dialogue is that it becomes fun to say and if it's fun to say then the actors get more enthusiastic and give more to the role. From my limited experience, mainly derived from being on the sets of others, I have found that the dialogue present in a lot of student films would be hard to say for anyone, let alone amateurs. They always feel restrained and non-expressive, the dialogue I see in the films around me represent characters that in these older films would be introverts or social outcasts.
After all this up and down and my inability to decide whether or not I even liked what I had I decided to scrap the idea of this adaptation completely and change course, the problems inherent with it's length and the limitations I had were just not applicable to the story in my head. Of course I tried finding work-arounds, I read Matthew Wilmshurst's script and it was very concise, clear and started and finished within it's seven pages. A resolution was present and this is something I felt my film would dearly miss.
This relates back to the efficiency present in It's A Wonderful Life, I built my story with the idea that I would introduce things slowly at first, relying off mystery to engage the audience, and by the second half I would re-incorporate what I had set-up and provide both a clarity to what had been going on as well as a new direction for the character to head in.
I wished that I could change the story, make it all happen in one room, but the idea I had at the time was too specific and I couldn't divorce from it, instead I changed course completely:
IDEA 2: THE HUNGER ARTIST
Well not completely, I kept within the genre and subject matter that I had set myself. To look for new story inspiration I did some research on Kafka and his other works.
The first I came upon, and something I had read a long time ago was The Hunger Artist.
Link to PDF: http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/literature/kafka/hunger.pdf
Once again I found myself enamored just as much by the man as, maybe even more-so by him than, his work. Kafka's life was a very depressing one and even though I couldn't relate to him concerning child-abuse, a hated father or being forced into a corporate system, I could relate to his insecurities in his own creative output and hatred of the work he produced.
Kafka demanded his written work be burned once he died because he despised it so much. Which was exactly how I felt at that moment about my previous idea and drafts - I hated them with a passion and they caused me great turmoil, the relief coming only once I had decided to let it die and never have anyone know about it (a standpoint I have since changed).
The last thing Kafka wrote was The Hunger Artist, somewhat inspired by his last days wherein he couldn't eat because of sickness. He died of starvation days after the completion of this story - yeah his life was pretty morbid.
THE IDEA
The idea was very simple - make an adaptation of Kafka's four page short, but set it completely in one room with just two people talking. This type of activity is fun because the story itself has a lot of narration, something that I can't do in a short, especially not one of this sort.
This method of finding ways to communicate the same ideas in such a limited space combined with a bigger focus on the actual blocking and look of the film is what got me excited to take the short in this direction.
What's the symbolism? What am I trying to say?
I had my insecurities about the subject matter and what I was trying to say with it.
No resolution
The resolution I had in mind feels weak and more as part of a larger story, something I wanted to avoid this time around. I wasn't sure what exactly to do with the end and the answer never came to me, people would watch it and even if it was good the ending would leave them asking what the point of it was at all.
Location Hunt
One of the biggest obstacles that this particular story presents is its setting. It just has to be office or room, but the look in my mind fits no space that I know exists in my immediate surroundings or that I have access to. I imagine a cluttered but high ceilinged room with big windows and a desk. This requires far too much work on my part as even if I find the appropriate space it would mean carting props and set decoration in and out and that just complicates it too much. The closest thing I can think of using would be the Dance studio but it's a bit of a far cry from what I had in mind. It would work if I twisted it the right way, I am filming in black and white anyway, but there are even more problems I had with this story that prevented me carrying it through to its conclusion.
Then again Orson Welles said about The Trial and the lack of sets he had: "I had planned to make a completely different film. Everything was improvised at the last moment, because the whole physical concept of the film was quite different."1, so who am I to complain?
Casting Limitations
Who's going to play the starving guy?
IDEA 3: KAFKA FILM
I found myself going back to what I thought of at the start - firstly I'll begin with two men in a room like The Trial and have one of them enter uninvited (a concept that intrigued me so much initially that I thought it would work wonderfully in a short).
The big difference this time would be to better adapt themes from Kafka's life. His work is supposed to make you feel like the characters - confused, ashamed and exposed. I decided to make this one of the cornerstones of my new story - a man ashamed of his writing has a visitor tear it to shreds.
Charlie Kaufman makes another appearance, the film he wrote called Adaptation really shows the mind of a writer and it's very entertaining, and relatable to watch. It is relevant to my work because the character in that film tears himself down a lot and seriously questions what he's doing wrong. These are things I felt during this entire process and something I wanted present in this film, except the words of insult would come from the inspector or overseer character.
The idea here was of course to metaphorically represent the writing process and personify the "don't let the judge in too quickly" idea.
THE IDEA
The idea is actually very similar to my first idea:
A man is sleeping when early one morning someone enters his room without permission. His interrogation immediately starts after making the mistake of assuming his nieghbour would come through the door. This time however we learn that the Inspector character is not a stranger to the man, a regular visitor - just never this unexpected or early in the morning. Something else obviously brought the man there this morning and he is playing it off as a normal inspection. The inspection itself involves a reading of what the man (I'm calling him 'K' still) has written over the past couple of weeks. This day the overseer tears the man's work apart pointing out in detail what's wrong with it and why it's not going to work. The man finds out that K has packed and is planning on going somewhere, with the packed suitcase he finds a bundle of letters - one of them is addressed to the overseer himself. A letter which he finds to be brutally honest. Throughout this conversation K steals the man's key to the neighbours door. The inspector is abusive to K, claiming he will never leave this place unless he writes properly and leaves upset. K, now alone, peers through the keyhole to his neighbour's room. There are more men there, they leave however seemingly done. He uses his key and goes into the apartment finding a rope made from bed sheets and such leading towards the window. He looks down, face turns to horror and sits by the window weeping.
Originally I thought a funny scene would simply be an overseer/judge type character coming into the room and absolutely tearing down the author's work then leaving. A funny, abusive little tale. As I developed it in my mind it obviously spun out in all different directions, still not sure if that was a good thing. The essence of what I was trying to do - the Kafka touch - is what I hope still shines through.
In a way this is what I wanted to do originally, make one small contained scene out of the concept presented by The Trial and not spin it off into something much too large. I think I needed the Hunger Artist buffer between to clear my head and divorce myself from the original idea though.
The weird thing with this one is that when I did this rough outline thing I realised that The Trial script had become essentially seared into my mind and that I was using it as a jumping off point for everything I write now, maybe just to get into the rhythm - I'm not a 100% sure but it might be a big problem as it is essentially plagiarism.
And this is where I hit my first road block:
It's too internal
My immediate reaction to this idea was "no, it's an internal conflict, even personified it's not the type of thing I want to make." There are so many indies that rely on boring stories where the only conflict present is internal, that's something I want to avoid in my work. It's funny that I can pinpoint the things I don't want, but can't decide what I actually want to do.
On second thought it doesn't really matter. I have conflict between the overseer and K and that should be entertaining enough. Also it doesn't matter if I end up not making anything - always better to put something out there even though it's not exactly what you wanted (a lesson I've been struggling against).
It's too personal
More personal preference. There are way too many artsy things where the artist are secretly (or not so secretly) talking about their own experiences and the only thing I could think when I started formulating this idea was that "personal experiences are never entertaining on film". People so often think that their own lives would be interesting to make a movie about and it very rarely, if ever is. I find myself at times thinking that if things in our lives were present in a book (like the fact that our campus is an old bank or that I work across from a prison) that I would find them more interesting than I do in real life.
Here is an actual, real problem with the idea, the ending that I have in mind is not satisfying and it's just depressing. If people watch the film they'll forget about it immediately because a deliberately depressing finale doesn't have much of an impact on anyone.
I excuse this however, because Kafka was a very depressed man who wrote very depressing things with no less depressing endings. The Hunger Artist dies after revealing he never found anything he liked eating, the thing in Metamorphosis crawls away and dies when he realizes no one even sees him as human anymore and Joseph K. is executed without ever finding out why.
All of those endings have something to say in some capacity though, at the very least it leaves the viewer thinking. Mine is K finding that his neighbour did escape but fell to her death, so maybe that's good enough. It could reinforce how his dreams are futile - who knows.
Before I move onto the storyboards and schematics and such, I would like to point out that this blog was written completely in hindsight. It took me a couple of days to cycle through these different ideas, I started about Friday last week and it consumed most of my waking moments, so I have to also say in hindsight maybe doing the blog as I went along would not have been the worst idea. We had a class this week where we looked at "active documentation" and maybe that term is perfectly applicable here. These things are present in my mind, I might as well put them on the page.
This blog was written as if a part of active documentation as I find that when I come with ideas and test them out there are thousands of influences from thousands of different places and in this format I have to explain each of them making it look kind of like a mess. One might question whether or not the inclusion of films like The Double and It's A Wonderful Life in this blog is at all necessary, and they might not be but they are part of my process and that's what the blog is supposed to reflect.
I find that the process itself might be more interesting than what I ended up producing, like one of those videos on YouTube where the development of a failed Hollywood project is detailed (e.g. Kubrick's Napoleon epic that never came to fruition or Jorrodowsky's Dune - not saying that my ramblings at all compares).
Anyway on to the actual deliverables (in which the script wasn't even included):
DELIVERABLES
The artist Thomas Ott served as an inspiration going into my storyboards. The fact is that I am not very good at drawing cleanly and clearly, so I decided that for this project I would try a different style, there are no real rules to how storyboards should be drawn anyway.
I chose Ott because I remembered seeing one of his books in the library (The number : 73304-23-4153-6-96-8), thinking it was a really cool style and showing my brother, only for him to say that it wasn't as hard to achieve as it looks or as it seemed to me. Which was perfect for what I needed now, and in the past I found that I form images slowly out of shading when I draw anyway instead of having a clear picture in my head when I start.
The other reason, and the reason I thought of him at all, was because during work on this project I had been trying to find visuals and music that capture the feel of Kafka's work, these graphic novels were one of the ones that immediately came to mind. Ott's work feels oppressive and the way he shows lighting with the cross hatching style is very similar to Noir.
With this style I could focus as much on the lighting I want as I could on the framing and I think that's very important for the project I'm working on. I actually found myself going to my panels and from them designing the lighting schematics.
STORYBOARDS
Link to Final Submission PDF:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N1f_PVj1AXB4nklehRXFfIm7QzWCXli2
Only after completion of these did I realize that my model changes the colour and direction of his cross hatching - which if I did could have mine at least a little better.
LIGHTING SCHEMATICS
I think I completely messed up the lighting schematics. We looked at it way back in Week 5, I still have the draft of the blog I started and I don't remember anything from it. I think we were supposed to use some kind of program or template for the schematics but because I never looked into it I ended up rushing it at the last minute and just drawing them with a pen below my storyboards.
1) https://cinephiliabeyond.org/trial-orson-welles-exhibition-paranoia-illogicality-personal-responsibility-take-kafkas-classic/
