The title of my film is Addict. I chose to base my cinematography and conventions in the style of British social realism. The theme of my film is drug abuse. This required a realistic approach to filming, and because the sequence I chose to film was a scene about the protagonist coming off drugs, it would have to be quite hard-hitting for the audience to view. Here is a paragraph from my aims and context to show what I was aiming for with my work.
'I aim to create a short three minute scene from my imagined film which is titled Addict. The scene itself will be a montage of the protagonist of the film enduring giving up drug use. The genre of my film is drama, it is a serious comment on drug abuse. The full story of my film is to be found in my synopsis.'
The conventions of the typical British social realism film are:
- Usually portrays characters not usually shown in mainstream films, such as the working class, drug addicts etc.
- The leading characters are often anti-heroes, which are protagonists that lack the usual traits such as nobility and kindness.
- Portrays the ‘ugly realities’ of the working class. Usually the poor.
My film conforms to the conventions of this genre, I will talk about why.
In the first stages of the creative process, I knew because of my chosen genre that it would be foolish to have certain camera edits such as a wipe or dissolve, as they would look totally out of place in a supposedly realistic film, they would break the atmosphere I was intending to create. I stuck to fade-outs, fade-ins and the simple cut to keep in with the realism. During filming the lighting was a real struggle. I wanted it to look grim and dark to make the audience feel claustrophobic, that they were in the room with the character,
I feel that I could have had more of an interesting range of shots, rather just than MS, LS, CU etc. More high-angle shots would have made the character seem really small, emphasizing his loneliness and pain. Sound was important in my film. Without the non-diegetic sound - the drum ‘n’ bass track in the background the emotional response in my film would have been a lot less. The track was very tense and yet energetic to emphasize the panic
My establishing shot is high-angle shot showing
The colours in Addict are de-saturated and drained, which connotates that this characters life-force is leaving him, that he can’t take anymore what is happening to him. It also emphasises the grittiness of the film as the colours look dirty, dark and pale. When Leon is looking around the room franticly; the camera showing what he see’s through his eyes, what I was trying to show was him being paranoid, as the shots that follow them Is him moving his head fast as if he was looking around in panic. I feel that this could have been done more at the start of the film rather than in the middle. It works well in adding to the panic but not that well in showing paranoia which is what I wanted to be.
Overall the sequence suits what I needed, what I aimed to make it satisfies it, but I do not think that the quality of it is good enough professionally. But I used the skills I learnt from FM1 during my AS year in mise-en-scene and stylistics quite well to satisfy the aims and context. If I had the opportunity to do it all again, I would much rather film a scene in stage one of the film, during the first equilibrium stage, because if during the scene there were other characters involved, I could show more of a typical British gritty film.
