Week 5 – Pettrus C. A. Vizioli

So, this was a wild one. It has been almost a month since I did the part and I still have some bruises from it. Relax, relax, nothing major. Nevertheless, the experience of just giving yourself to a role was quite fun. I never took myself to be an actor or anything like that, I know my limitations. But, from time to time some roles get my attention, especially the ones where words aren’t needed. I was waiting for a week where Aaron would be the Director, just to see what he would come up with. So there we were: his script on our hands, and locations and props to sort out.

The whole story was a metaphor. We knew that right away. I mean, it’s not that hard, at least from the script to understand clearly what it all meant. The script started with nature shots. Nothing but blissful nature. Then, out of nowhere, the main character, let’s call him Jon would run past the camera, breaking the silence and the stillness of nature. He was running from something, but that something was never shown. The sound of people and metal could be heard ever so slightly on the background. Every step Jon took would have a metallic, lifeless, stamp. He would break branches and leave footprints wherever he went. Oh, and his hands were tied, which is kinda important. Then, after falling and running for some while, he would stop and see a bridge, he would cross it calmly, look back, the metallic sounds wouldn’t be there anymore. He’d free himself from his shackles and catch a breather. Pretty simple, eh?

Ok, so, getting out of theory land and coming back to reality, the shooting itself was a bit rocky. Some of the potentially great images weren’t filmed with it’s most power. By that I mean the bridge scene. The shots from the bridge were suppose to look somewhat like that:

But they ended up looking like this:

And the editing was the thing that the whole group disagreed the most. Frankly I didn’t like how the editing turned out. The whole pacing was a bit all over the place and some of the shots lacked focus. Not focus in the sense of the focus on the lenses, but on the eyes of what was important for the frame. There was a lot of dead space and lack of movement.

This is one of the shorts that I plan to try to edit it again at some point in the future, just because I really liked the idea of it. The lesson that I got from this week’s exercise was that theory and practice can vary really easily.