To Be or Not To Be...

Having prepared the pitch for my project and presented it in class, I was able to look more objectively at the idea and if it had the ability to work as a short film. It will work as a short film, but only as an opening act to a feature, at least thus far in the way I have attempted to structure it. Now this also brings something else to my attention. If I make the short and don't decide to make the feature, I will have a film that won't be as powerful as a short film constructed to be a short film because it will lack a penultimate climax and resolution in favour of an ambiguous ending that will serve the feature. This will also, I believe inevitably make it weaker because it is lacking the wholeness of the story at large.

I have gone through a few successful short films, having obtained copies of the Cinema16 series, and it seems the most successful are the ones that isolate one moment in a characters lives, and explore the ideas within that moment to the fullest. In other words, they seem to draw a maximum amount of conclusions from a minimum amount of observations. This I believe is the secret to their strength. They rarely rely on plot and reveal character through action. Which in most cases tends to be the response to one inciting incident that happens extremely quickly, if not before the beginning, and is resolved by the end of the short amount of time of the film. It is a successful recipe however I do not believe it is any easier, to the contrary, it requires thorough research of setting and character and really getting the script to the bare essentials of what is required to tell the story.

Brian Percival's, "About A Girl", is about teenage pregnancy and how it affects the children involved. To begin the film, in one shot he gives us all the information we need about the theme, character and setting
and he does this in the most remarkable way. A landscape shot, a beautiful blue sky, a young girl in complete silhouette, mimicking the moves and singing the words to Britney Spears, 'Stronger'. He then ended the film with the girl walking out of shot, singing the same shot but with her back to the camera and her shoulders hunched over slightly, in a different tone, she will never be the same again because of the journey we had just taken with her. This film, in its brevity, was so poignantly poetic that we instantly understood the characters, their motivations, the socio-economic conditions and how they affects of child pregnancy are affecting the society as a whole.