Production folder

1 minute experimental link:
https://vimeo.com/190608847

Modified treatment:

A man is followed by a strange presence to a run down hotel, where he books a room. The man is driven insane by the hellish hotel, and is consumed by it in a nightmarish sequence.

A man walks down a long dark urban tunnel, carrying many bags and rolling a suitcase behind him. The camera follows, and as he drops his suitcase gains ground on him. The man swiftly pulls the suitcase up, looking at the camera and hurrying away. Later he arrives at the abandoned hotel, where the man, in confusion, enters and finds his room. He finds his corridor and room eerily intact, enters, lights a cigarette, and goes to sleep.

As he falls asleep the film enters his nightmares, in bizarre visions around the hotel and perhaps beyond. He finds himself trapped his dream and trapped within the hotel.

Further ideas/development:

A blind man goes to a hotel to regain his eye sight. The cinematography reflects his blindness. In his nightmares he is symbolically given his eyes back, and sees the hellish hotel he is living in for the first time. His vision fades from broken images on film and tape to digital, altering in quality as he leaves.

Inspiration:
Julia's eyes (Gulliem Moralles, 2010)
Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
A scanner darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) and Waking life (Linklater, 2001)

Style notes:
Camera:

For our one minute piece we shot, for convenience of movement and its ability to deal with low light, on a Pentax Q, a digital mirrorless compact capable of standard HD 1080p@24fps. The small sensor allowed deep depth of field even with a wide aperture (f1.9), making refocusing unessential whilst moving the camera. The weightlessness of the camera allowed for fluid handheld movement yet susceptible to human hand shake due to this. To make this less evident, I used a 0.45x adapter on the 8.5mm lens, making it a 3.8mm (21.4mm 35mm equivalent, 5.6x crop factor). Making the frame wider also allowed me to follow the character with ease whilst moving myself.

For the 5-10 minute, I hope to experiment with other mediums more such as tape and film. We used tape briefly in our film Scarlet Heath last year, but did not experiment with the medium to it's full potential. By recording the playback, We are able to pause, fast forward and rewind the tape as it plays, distorting the image. I hope to also use film, both scratching onto 16mm (perhaps for transitions, to build up, consume the image, and die down to reveal the next shot) and perhaps also 35mm. I have experimented with shooting using stills 35mm film through an electronic film stills camera (Canon EOS 5), shooting 36 frames at 5fps, giving me 7.2 seconds of film for one roll. I will develop this myself to give it a rough, grainy and dirty aesthetic. Although substantially cheaper than cine film, shooting this way would still be very difficult financially and time consuming. However, integrating this with the tape footage (made similar through a 4:3 aspect ratio and black and white) would be affordable and provide variation. I hope that the gradual destruction of the image, moving to older and lower frame rate mediums (from tape to stills film) will convey a form of reduction narrative, alike Outer Space, where the film slowly dies.

 (stills in the location using the film I plan to use in the 5-10 minute)

Shooting burst mode also allows me to shift seamlessly from 5fps continuous shooting to slow shutter speed stills, as if there were no cut (on a tripod). This allows us to create ghostly slow shutter effects

in the same take as actual moving footage.

Costume/ Props:

The lamp was made from an old lampshade and most of a broom attached to a base, and painted black. We shot the lamp so as to appear unimportant, yet due to us rushing to fit into one minute it was difficult to convey the lamps significance to the man, as it appears only briefly at the beginning. To give the body a timelessness that the lampshade and location had, we had the lampshade man wear a brown trenchcoat, an article of clothing that has been around since the late 19th/ early 20th century. This gave the film no clear certainty in when it is set, or what time period this being is from.

Sound:

Due to only using synch sound we have been unable to experiment much, however this will match the visuals' broken style. Tape static sounds, crackling, sound from mechanical fault is perfect for this. Synch sound from the visuals can be distorted, such as altering the pitch to give the audio an uncomfortable wrongness. We don't hope to use any or much dialogue. The protagonist, if any, should be struggling internally, and not express himself through speech, at least not to other characters.


Location:

Before shooting our 1 minute, we decided we wanted to film in an abandoned location, one unseen and hidden away, one that has been, since it's desolation, unaffected by time. We researched local locations using an urb-ex (urban exploration) website www.28dayslater.co.uk. We decided the best two locations were Park Hill or Hallam Tower, so we looked around both.

Park Hill looked fantastic, however it was much more open than we had hoped (all interiors had been blocked). The location was very public, and also littered with used syringes, making the location simply too unsafe to film.

Hallam Tower was perfect, as although not all of the structure was safe, the floor we filmed on was clear and safe. The walls were laid bare, with pipes jutting from the ceiling and wallpaper peeling from the rooms. We searched the area first and made sure it was clear for our actor, who had limited visibility to about 2 meters in front of his feet, although was always well lit from his head.

Influence and inspiration:
Directors:
-David Lynch (Inland Empire, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Six figures getting sick
The films of David Lynch have heavily inspired our approach aesthetically and thematically, in particular Eraserhead (1977),  Lost Highway (1997) and Inland Empire (2006), which for me create the strongest sense of nausea and claustrophobia. I hope to perhaps use similar methods of breaking the fourth wall in Inland Empire, and a similar dark and gritty aesthetic to Eraserhead.

-Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a dream)
Pi's (1998) aesthetic, claustrophobic sets and unstable, paranoid protagonist are all strong inspirations for own own piece. I hope to create similar feelings of helplessness Aronofsky creates in Pi and Requiem for a dream (2000). Addiction is also a possible theme for our film and struggle for the protagonist, and the Requiem's techniques (such as the fast editing) can perhaps inspire our own.

-Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror, Stalker)
Less thematically, and more visually and structurally from his films Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979). Mirror's non-linear narrative structure flows back and forth over decades, yet does not attempt to make it clear what time we are viewing, forcing the viewer to piece together a puzzle of images, dreams and memories. Stalker is perhaps the best example of using simple, existing locations extremely effectively. Although not shown, through the script, camerawork and editing Tarkovsky creates an unsettling uncertainty in the true nature of the location. It is as much a character as the three men, ominous and ever present, visible and invisible. In the editing and cinematography style however i hope to take a very different approach to Tarkovsky.

-Harmony Korine (Julien Donkey-Boy, Gummo)
The nauseating cinematography and upsetting scenes of Gummo (1997) and Julien-Donkey Boy (1999) are inspirations for our own film, particularly the manipulation of the film image in Julien Donkey-Boy. Intended as a dogma-95 film, the film works with it's limitations by filming a screen of a slow motion dancer over music coming through the television. The detail of the image is almost completely destroyed.

Other films:
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto, 1989) - I love this film's gritty black and white visuals, low budget practical effects and it's insane and creative editing and camera effects, creating the appearance of impossible movement through high speed burst shooting. The film is simple in plot, being playful and experimental in it's use of time, rather than using it to communicate a clear narrative.
The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) - I plan to use the same trope of a haunted hotel affecting the mind of its residents, driving them to insanity.
Antichrist (Von Trier, 2009)
Irreversible (Noé, 2002)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
Under the skin (Glazer, 2013)

Short films:
Outer space (Peter Tscherkassy, 1999)
Fridge (Peter Mullan, 1995)
Six figures getting sick (David Lynch, 1996)