In my previous post I speak about my idea for a short film Lobster Man. In this post, I will be talking about the process of making this film as well as showing the outcome.
So my dad and I made our way to the park with a stool, an old phone, the lobster painting I did and my film camera. The main different]ce between my plan and the execution was the fact that I had planned for the subject to be sat down whilst the stool would have been next to him. The reason for this was because I wanted this piece to resemble Magritte’s Son of Man more closely. There is also a difference in the setup – I had planned to use a tripod to hold the paining in frame of the subjects head, however, unfortunately the wind was far too strong this day and it wouldn’t hold up.
Even though I had changed the positioning of the subject, I still wanted to try and have a shot of him sitting down with the phone on his lap. I think they looked good but they didn’t remind me of the Son of Man enough – so we resulted to going back and placing him standing up.
It is very discreet but the colour of the ties and shoes are very deliberate. There are blue and orange squares in the tie and the vibrant orange/brown shoes tie into the orange of the painting. As well as having thought about the aesthetic of the piece, there is also a hidden meaning behind the blue and orange tie – the Homarus gammarus, the European or common lobster, is blue while alive but becomes red when cooked. The idea of the painting is to make it look like a Polaroid – the permanence of a photograph is juxtaposed with the life of the lobster.
The image above was my favourite shot so we chose to shoot most of the videos from this angle. The amount of wind this day made it extremely difficult for the camera to be still. This made it even harder for my dad as he had to try to be as still as possible whilst holding a mounted piece of card. We were extremely lucky with the weather – the sun came out in out favour and enhanced the vibrancy of the surrounding and suit particularly well. Below is a screenshot of the process of editing the video.
I used an app called iMovie. It was extremely easy to use – I just uploaded my video and added the sounds I wanted to it. To do this I actually recorded the sounds off of YouTube using Voice Memos, then I saved them as files making it easier to import them to iMovie. I then held and dragged the sound clips for them to play where I wanted. I inserted a clip of birds singing throughout the whole clip to cement the setting. I then added a phone wringing and being picked up, and the final sound added was a phone being hung up. I managed to sync the sounds to the video well but once I had exported the video, unfortunately the resolution was not as good.
Overall, I’m really happy with the way this turned out, I fell like it would have been so much better with a better resolution but I fell with the way the day went with the unexpected weather conditions – I’m really happy I managed to execute what I was imaging in my head.
My surreal world 