transience: a short collaborative film
"a dramatic + tragic + beautiful love story, with vintage inspired touches"
by colin strom and zoe chu
We want to create a dramatic romance-esque film that emphasizes the use of color/lighting to set the stage for the different stages present in a romantic encounter/situation. Drawing inspiration from vintage film, we aim to very clearly separate our short film into 3 distinct sections using actual title screens, color grading, background music, aspect ratio, and lighting shifts to clearly define the 3 separate portions of our short film. Though our film won’t have a “happy” ending, we aim to elicit many emotional responses from our audience, which is why we wanted to create a short film in the first place. By creating these dramatic shifts, we can play on the viewer’s emotions- starting out the film with a cutesy warm feeling and breaking abruptly to filmography that purposely makes the viewers uncomfortable- with much quieter music, uncomfortably slow pacing, and slightly jarring sound effects to emulate and demonstrate to the viewers the heartbreak and distress our characters are feeling. For the ending, we will lead the viewers to believe that things will all end happily, slowly incrementing the shots to look like the beginning again, and abruptly again shift back to a more solemn shot.
the moodboard:
the rough outline:
Chapter 1:
- Saturated vintage feel (old yellow captions) 4:3 aspect ratio
- Starting with a scene of a pair on a bridge together, feeling is light and they are shown to get along well, both faces are shown at some point with shifts to two face shots of them being interested
- Second scene shows their hands working on origami (recurring theme that binds them together) shows their hands working, with quick shifts to their smiling laughing faces and more flirty/interested faces
- Following scenes are a montage that speeds up (with music matching the mood, crescendo and growing tempo) of them doing different activities, many with their hands, origami spread throughout (whether actually doing it or seeing remnants of it in the background).
- Scenes show more and more of just their faces and hands before cut in second chapter
Chapter 2:
- Snap (film roll cut) cut from vintage, cold desaturated, music is more depressing and much quieter- focus on awkward natural sound effects, 16:9 aspect ratio
- Begins with slow scenes that drag out in uncomfortableness
- Obsessive origami making montage, few seconds of making, shift to later time, same angle alternating from awkward distance to just hands, different seating position, ends with them all being in the trash with empty chair
- Further unnerving awkward scenes
- Making coffee, starts with awkward view from distance (body language indicates discomfort as they rub their shoulder), takes a long time for machine to spit out coffee in ugly sound, maybe coffee overflows from cup but person does nothing
- Low music, typing slowly noises, swipe away origami on table, shift to leg bouncing below, shakes the table to an excessive amount
- Don’t see faces, expressed through body language
Chapter 3:
- Slow move towards more saturated color grading on the final bridge scene, looks like they are about to reconcile with each other and music gets really loud and scene is bright- before snap and back to cold, desaturated, silence as they walk past each other, three beats of notes/chords, black
animatic:
