Synopsis
Max falls in love with smiley and when he finds the cur rage to do something about it he finds out that she had been keeping from him
The story being told in the film
The story being told in our film is one very true to life as most people will have had this heartbreaking event happen to them or known of some one who has had this happen to them before.
In the story max who is a young love stuck teenage guy lusts after a girl (Emily), and on the night of one of David's many parties he decides to act on his lust and make a move. He is successful in doing so and is pleased with the result of it, thinking that he will be able pursue a relationship with her. but unfortunately for Max everything is not as simple as it seams as by a chance meeting he sees Emily in the street with another guy which leaves him shattered, confused and lonely.
The main underlying meaning and theme we have tried to convey in this film are issues such as miscommunication as Max has fallen for Emily quite heavily and thinks she feels the same after one night of passion, but she really has no idea what she actually wants leading them both in an awkward situation.
Other underlining feelings we have tried to express are love, heartbreak and the crushing realisation of being alone after you thought you had something special.
Films that inspired me
There are a few films that helped inspire what I wanted the film to look like but a main source came from the film "La Jetee" released in march 1996 directed and written by Chris Maker. The thing about this film that really grabbed my attention was how you could communicate a strong atmosphere of emotions with just photos, that if you leave a photo on screen long enough it resonates with you more than a moving image because you don't get lost in action but you get caught up in a moment just like the saying goes "a picture is worth a thousand words". From the moment I was shown this film that I wanted to use this technique of story telling because it was a lot different to any other film I had seen before and as a group we wanted the film to be very experimental any way so it would fit in nicely.
Along side this the film "The Passion Of Joan Of Arc" directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and released in 1928 really caught my eye as our project is set around a film with no dialog. when I was watching this particular film the one thing I really noticed was the emotional capabilities that you can convey with just making your viewer look into a character's face. This is where the idea for the first scene came from, just to keep the scene built around just their facial expressions so you get a grasp of what the situation max is in before you get to see what is actually going to happen.
Other artworks that inspired my roles in the film
Other research I did to benefit my role as editor was listen to specific songs by specific bands to help me get into the same mind set as the characters in the film and empathise more with what they where going through. I was able to do this as our sound engineer Aleks wanted to do almost all the sound in post so I didn't have to deal with any foley noise, I could just press play on a song and start editing to help the creative juices flowing.
For example I knew the opening scene was going to be very slow and dream like so a listened to a song entitled ™ by an artist by Jack Kilmer which was released as a part of the movie "Palo Alto" on the 29th of August 2013. It gives me a sort of lost feeling of teenage confusion which is something that I wanted to be prominent in this scene.
Another song I used to help me get into the right emotional state to edit was "Death" by Viet Cong, I used this to submerge my self into editing the final scene where Max is harbouring a lot of anger towards Emily, and the sequence of shots where the image of a rock hitting the water and the image of Emily looking disgusted in her self are layered on top of each other to make it look like max is throwing a rock at emily out of anger was inspired by this song as with out the feeling the breakdown of the song gave me I don't think I would have been able to come up with this concept.
