Synopsis for INDIA – Self-initiated Project

This is a project that I have been thinking and dreaming for some time but due to my daily busy life as well as procrastination, I have not been able to work on this project for further development. Since I have some free time at the moment, I sincerely think that I should start thinking about how to develop this idea into a much more concrete proposal. I have prepared a small synopsis for On the Bridge, a workshop where I will have the possibility to present it. Hopefully by the end of next week, I will have a much more concrete synopsis.

“I’ll not date in August” (working title)

Premise: Peace leads to a happy life but does peace come easy? Adaptation from I.N.D.I.A, a short story written by Dana Dutch

This is a proposal for a ten minute short film for a younger generation about a girl who meets a boy when in her life she gave up thinking about romance. She finally decides that she really cannot dictate anything to her own heart and wonders how funny little circumstances brought major changes in her life.

The purpose of producing this film is to give the viewer the experience that sometimes we are so fed up with out busy lives, we really have hard times understanding what is really going on around us. This is the story of a girl who happens to meet somebody when she expects the least from the opposite sex. 

Moreover, by adapting a short story from a comic book written by Dana Dutch, I expect to reveal the glossy aesthetics from the melodramas of the 50s as well as capturing and interpreting the sudden emergence of the boy and the girl. The story deals with the inner life of its characters and to visualize it in a cinematic manner is the purpose of the film. 

 

What Have I Learned Today?

Yesterday morning, I was asked by my directing teacher Jarmo Lampela to produce a one minute script and shoot it the next day which means this morning. The main idea for this exercise was to enhance our skills on ADR which is the dubbing process. Dubbing is the post production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting.

One of the major reasons why I love the film department in Taik is that you are always asked to produce short films in a very small scale of time. That kind of exercises really teaches you how to become alert all the time not only in case of film practice but also as an individual. For exemple, Susanna Helke’s class was held in a way that we were expected to write small articles all the time on subjects such as what is political for us and what kind of political events have we had that had a long term affect on our lives. These kind of exercises really teaches you to become aware of your surrounding and help you in a way to deepen your skills in filmmaking.

I was informed by Jarmo that I would get two actors, one male and one female so I had to write a short story about a couple. Moreover, I wanted to emphasize the sound because we were going to practice ADR for the first time and I really wanted the sound has a major point in the story. This is the story I came up with:

Tom is in the kitchen to make some coffee. Julia is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Tom takes two cups from the closet and starts boiling the water. He asks if she wants any coffee. “Black or white” he adds. She says black but her answer is incomprehensible because of the brush in her mouth. Tom goes to the toilet and asks her again. Her answer is black. He puts hot water in two cups -one of them is black, the other is white- and he puts milk in one of them. Julia goes out from the bathroom and takes the black coffee. Tom approaches her and hits the glasses. He seems happy. “To Buenos Aires” he says. Julia grimaces and explains that she won’t be able to make it. “Why not?” says Tom still hugging Julia and trying to kiss her. “We will have the best time of our life there!” Julia steps back harder and saves herself from Tom. Tom takes Julia’s coffee and runs to the bathroom. He locks the door. Julia comes to the bathroom but she cannot get in because the door is locked. She tries to apologize but he is busy washing the cups. He pours both cups in the lavatory and that creates a weird mixture of both milky and black coffee.

We had to shoot it very fast and we only had one hour to shoot all the actions. In case of filmmaking, I always tend to think storytelling by shots, in a way that I would like to shoot the scenes by blocking the actors and the actions in the right compositional way, starting from a wide shot to the close ups in the end and so forth. I always feel secure by using that methodology and it is really hard to skip a shot.

Well for this exercise, I had to shoot the shots by rolling all the story from the beginning to the end. I think it was quite difficult for the actors since they had to perform all the text once we said action. The reason why I chose this way because I didn’t have time to rehearse with the actors. I didn’t really know how I was going to block them in case of the place of the camera and editing. I gave my camera operator full initiatives which gave me a chance to concentrate on the actors.

I just finished synchronizing the materials and made a rough cut. I realized that I shot one establishing shot, two medium shots and one medium shot in the bathroom. I think it would be better if we had some close up. Anyway, I think we did a good job in a very limited time! Now we will see what happens with the editing and the sound design.

Film Noir

I have a great desire to write more about Almodóvar these days, as I loved his last film “Broken Embraces“, for me it was a perfect mixture of melodrama, film noir and Pop Art. And I love every one of them. As I understood from his interviews, he is a director who repeatedly sets his stories on his memoir and souvenirs and tries to borrow from everywhere that he adores and his films are the melting pots of his own dreams, fears and interpretations.
There is always one single fact in film noir. The existence of a dangerous woman. For me, today, was “Volver” day and I don’t seem to recall a better composition (see above) to describe what film noir is in any of the films that I have seen before. The breasts of the beautiful actress Penelope Cruz seem perfectly the right spot for the audience to look at but on the left side of the composition, we see Penelope’s hands washing a knife. But we are not aware of it since we are stuck to these two beautiful breasts and we ignore completely the dangerous side of the character. If you have already seen the film, you will know what comes in the next scene, and will understand what I am talking about.
Douglas Sirk is considered to be the master of melodramas especially the films that he did between the years 52 to 56. Today, very few melodramas are shot but from time to time, what I would call great film directors revisit the genre. Almodóvar is one of them. Todd Haynes also explored the genre in 2002 with “Far From Heaven” heavily influenced by Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows” and of course Sidney Lumet’s films can be considered to be a melodrama. I was very surprised when I found out that Lumet considered “Silence of the Lamps” one of the great melodramatic films of all time because he said there is nothing more melodramatic than a man eating human flesh. Now, that’s a definition we can not find in any of the books I think!
But what makes Almodóvar’s melodramas so unique is his use of vivid colors especially red heavily borrowed from Pop Art.