This week I began testing for my next short, which I believe I mentioned a few blogs ago. It’s the mocumentary about the girl with the imaginary boyfriend. You might remember the test I did for it last year.

Well I had done a script for the film but have decided to go back to the drawing board and take a different approach. I did some notes and planning of ideas to implement in to the story and messages that I wanted the audience to get from the film. It was rough and just notes but you can see this below.

 

After this I went through the character in great detail with the actress Natalie. We answered all the questions to the right in the pic, some of which the audience will never actually know but I find that it just gives the character better reason for being. So we did a test interview that was completely improved! As you can here we did take some notes of things that might work better but it actually went really well. You can listen to this below.

So I am going to be shooting an actual video interview next week and then following scenes in the upcoming weeks.

I am taking a lot of visual inspiration from ‘The Tree of Life’. It follows some of the rules of ‘Dogma’ which although its not something that I really enjoy for this project I am going to try and follow. So for this I am going to be using all natural light to the location, in which I am filming,

This is going to be difficult because its not an excuse to be lazy but rather a challenge to achieve a great looking film whilst sticking to these rules. Ultimately it will give me a more realistic looking film I believe and due to it being a mocumentary this should work to my advantage.

I took some pictures of Natalie to give me an idea of how to shoot the interview. The first ever test was very flat and I didn’t like it so I have decided to be a little more abstract with this one and take a more interesting approach.

 

I will only film around 2 angles of Natalie going through the questions but then get cutaways of her hands and feet to keep the interest throughout. I may go through the questioning a couple of times so that I have a couple of options.

 

The interviewing will take place in the characters living room, I am going to sit her against a window and film in to the light because I really like that flair and the low contrast under saturated grade which I am going for really matches this look.

 

Been playing around with logos and this is a very simple version of the kind of thing I am thinking of.

 

So I hope you like what you see so far and I would really love your feedback and ideas. Again this will be premiering on Film Annex first. So keep checking back for trailers and sneak peeks because I will be following this one through to the end in my blogs and upcoming videos.