In this cinematography project, I drew inspiration from “Home Alone” directed by Adrian Erre on NOWNESS. Conducted in confined room setting, it intends to set a private space for the protagonist – Max – to explore his deep-seated fantasies.
The narration is led through the voice of the character with minimal non-diegetic ambient music. The video is characterised by concentration on different angles and close-up shots that gradually reveals Max’s emotions and rebellion against society standards, which I find suitable to adopt into my film. I wanted to portray a creative makeup artist who has a talent for turning the bold and rare colours into a masterpiece using various shots to highlight her facial expressions.
This project features Jocelyn, a girl who has a natural flair for out-of-the-box makeup. I found Jocelyn through her digital artefact on Instagram, which is very colourful and playful. It therefore inspired me to create a poem about Jocelyn and her makeup talent through third person voice. I then continued to draw storyboards that visually match with my poem’s meaning. I tried to focus on images that could help express the charisma of Jocelyn, especially through her interesting makeup process that keeps people engaged. Her makeup looks have distinctive takes on colour combination and emphasis, which makes her different and special. This resonates with ‘A living rebel’ theme in a sense that the character loves trying on difficult colours that others are afraid of experimenting. To keep it short, I identify a rebel as someone who is innovative and willing to try new things.
The relationship between audio and visual media was established through non-diegetic sounds, i.e. narrator’s commentary and the score. In other words, the video is audio-driven in a way that visuals are determined to demonstrate the audio. I intended to make the soundscape simplistic because I wanted the voiceover of narrator to dominate and lead audience’s mood. Using third-person storytelling, “Jocelyn” implies the fascination and admiration of the narrator for the protagonist that she seems to know every detail about Jocelyn. In creating the voiceover, I tried to create an undertone, radio-like sound by using Low Pass effect and adjusting audio frequency level.
There has been quite an amount of changes compared to original storyboards after I reached the official filming location and discussed with the model. Since the space was much more crowded than we expected, we had to film in a small room with low lightning condition and had a little time video-graphing outdoors. Thus, I used a reflector to generate enough light on Jocelyn’s face and create dimension. Besides, since close-up shots are meant to tell audience to pay attention to something, most of the shots were close-up and extreme close-up as I planned to emphasise on Jocelyn’s unicorn-inspired makeup and facial expressions. I also played with various camera movements such as tilting, panning, tracking and zooming to pretend as if the camera had been an admirer who secretly observed Jocelyn’s beauty behind a door. In the last scene at 01:11, I experimented with studio lightning by continuously altering between intense and soft light, which resulted in camera’s focus adjustment and bokeh effect. Lastly, I edited the footages through a majority of discontinuity construction using cross dissolve transition, and slow-motion to be more focused on some visuals and create dreamy, illusional appearance of Jocelyn.
All in all, I really enjoyed the process and had learnt to be flexible with ideas in face of challenges. I also learnt to be creative with camera movements and angles as well as video editing to add meanings to the story. Although the three projects, i.e. photo-series, soundtrack, and cinematography, are distinctive from each other, I had a chance to get know different individuals each time and try my best to tell their personalities and stories via audio-visual forms, which was a wonderful experience.
References:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741136.2018.1464714
Helly Pham 