Week 2 – Pettrus C. A. Vizioli

How do people from different cultures perceive visual storytelling? That’s what always interested me in film. Growing up in a country that doesn’t speak English I’ve always seen films subtitled, until I finally learned the language, that is. My mother never quite understood English, even to the point that she hated how it sounded. Through my learning phase my mother would often join me in my viewing sessions, and as I never really liked to talk during the film, we just stayed quiet. After each session my mother would debate with me themes and things the film tried to establish and say. The best films, in my point of view, she could understand it all just by the imagery, editing, and directing. Even films that were from vastly different cultures could be understood by a non-speaker if the filmmakers knew what they were doing.

Visual storytelling was the name of the game. A lot of people, specially filmmaking students, whenever they want create a story they always go for drama. They want to make a deep and philosophical drama with deep and complex relations; which, by itself it’s not a problem, but they want to make it all in three minutes. So the probability of the short being good is fairly low, and that’s beginners were talking about, so inexperience is the norm. When we started debating how we should approach the Short, the group was already on pair with the whole “It Shouldn’t Be Rocket Science” mindset, so, as we only had two days to come up with the idea and script for the Short, we just tried to see if anyone already had an existing script for something that fit the criteria of either “pick-pocketing”, “chase”, or “late again”. I had written the script a few weeks back that fit the theme of late again like a glove, so I presented it to the group and we pretty much settled on it.

There’s a certain magic in the air whenever I’m amidst a shooting. It’s hard to describe, as I don’t even need to be working during the shooting. Once I was walking around through Portugal and found a random shoot for, well, something. I couldn’t really tell what it was for, even though it did seem to serve as some kind of commercial or some sort of heightened reality, as the character were dressed in a very stylized manner. Nevertheless, I just stood there, looking at how they were filming, how the actors were preparing themselves and such. I stayed there for about six hours. Just absorbing that overwhelming sense of aw and belonging. And that was the mindset for when I stepped in for shooting.

That’s the lesson I got from this Short. I feel like the whole short could have had one more edit, just to tinker a little bit with the sound and the length of some of the shorts. But, as the exercise push us towards trying to release each short without being overly zealous with it, we charged through some of it. Which is the closest to industry standards. The one true flaw in the short came through sound. As the teacher snorted the cocaine, the sound wasn’t put there, even though we had recorded it. As we didn’t put the sound in, it did not convey that the main character heard the whole teacher ordeal, so the final moment doesn’t have that much of a punch. Other than that the whole short was pretty solid, we even thought of it as the one to be used as the final project. Mostly everything is understandable, and we got a very wide variety of shots for each scene.

One of the biggest things that one of our teachers stressed was the fact that the characters should have strong personality traits that could be conveyed easily through visual and costume. Like our main character, we tried making him a very uptight and nervous individual and contrast it with the teacher (the authority figure) who was the complete opposite of what a person expects from an authority figure. Even her office was meant to convey the sloppy state that she choose to work in. One of the problem we had was with the location. We had asked one of the teachers for usage of her office, which she was okay with. But, at the day of shooting she had forgotten about it. That was one of my fears, as back in Brazil I had a lot of shoots with the same thing happened, so was kept that in the back of my mind. I went to her office first thing to see if it would still be available for shooting, which of course it wasn’t. But I managed to secure another teachers office to shoot in, so no harm done.

Here’s a Behind The Scenes of it: https://youtu.be/qK8EKaOCBtQ