After MADD week, we returned to our unit on experimental film. In today's class, we got into groups and started discussing potential ideas for our film and also our individual production roles. We decided our production roles by picking a paper slip with one of the four roles written on them. I was the director of this film; although this is not my first time taking on this role, I will relish this challenge by building on what I have learnt and experienced as a director and further improving myself and my work.
As the director, I decided to lead the group discussion by first offering the three possible investigations into experimental film in which we can explore: what constitutes a film; a philosophical/political/aesthetic theme; the basic medium of a film. We decided to explore a philosophical theme through this experimental film, in which we agreed on humanity's tendency to sin. More specifically, I am going to focus on the infamous "Seven Deadly Sins", and how pride (excessive love of self) is the root of all the other sins. Ms Wong liked my idea, but encouraged me to draw our thought process out so that we had a visual blueprint to refer to.
After having plotted our basic framework for our experimental film, Ms Wong advised us to start thinking about the technical and cinematic elements of this work. For example, the sound designer should think about how to represent "pride" through sounds; what does pride itself sound like? How can the editor suggest envy, for instance, by manipulating the pacing and the shot lengths? As a
reflector in the IB learner profile, I learnt a lot about the making of an experimental film in this class by isolating each cinematic element, and ended up thinking about film in a completely different way.
