Week 4 – Pettrus C. A. Vizioli

I have a very serious and totally not fake condition called Visual OCD. That means that I’m super nit picky with images. This weeks exercise was reenacting a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s excellent film Persona. My mother always was a great fan o Bergman’s. I can’t even remember the age that I saw The Seventh Seal for the first time. But, with that said, I’ve never seen Persona before. And I thought of doing something interesting. I wouldn’t watch the film until editing was concluded, just so I could appreciate it more after concluding the making of it. Which was exactly what happened.

Well, lighting equipment is not very easy to come by in Brazil, as most film related equipment’s are very pricey. I’ve watched so many videos about the theory of lighting so I didn’t feel that lost with it, even though I would usually, at least in photography, prefer to use natural lighting. But In film I reckon it needs to be different, everything needs to be, until a certain point, controlled. Weirdly enough my perception with film and photography are vastly different, even if they do meet halfway in some points. I’m a firm believer that photos are meant to represent the world, naturally. Meaning that I always avoid editing my photos too much or at all. With film I feel different. Film is supposed to be a window to a constructed reality, but more so than pictures, in my opinion. Photography is a photograph of reality. Film is the photograph of the photograph.

Well, in this exercise I put my best ability to do it’s magic: work under a tight schedule and a lot of pressure. The thing we didn’t realize was that we only had forty minutes left to shoot the entire picture. We took one hour to set up the first shot. Thirty minutes to set the props. So, after we kept doing and redoing shots of hands banging on a table, we finally started to listen to our producer, who was already saying that we had taken too much time with all that and that the rest of the shooting would be an uphill battle against father time. So, we just put our brains into efficiency mode and started doing every shot in an uncommon amount of time. The first half of the shooting was permeated by a sense of nothingness. I mean, we were doing things, but just tiny adjustments. From those last forty minutes onward we just covered all the ground we needed to end shooting in time. Even the most difficult shots we just needed to do them thrice. I even remembered my teachers words echoing in my head for that shot. “This one will be hell to pull off nicely”, and then, on my first try, I had done it. I felt a strange synergy with the whole group.

I really liked the part where I would just say to Korneliusz where to put the lights and he’d ran to put them in their place. I did that about fifty times. Even felt like just pointing to random places to see him carry it there, and then be like ‘Nah, bro. Never mind, undo the whole thing’.