For this project I am going to make a film inspired by George Méliès and his fascinating story based films. It is going to be a 3 minute short film, filmed completely in black and white. I will edit the film with our modern technology to see if i can duplicate the visual and the sense of a film created in the early 1900’s. My goal is to create a film that puts the audience back into Victorian times using digital technology, and testing my abilities in the editing process to achieve the look of an early 1900’s film.
My first idea was to film like they did using only similar equipment and editing by not using modern technology. However, due to time to complete this project i don’t want to risk having an uncompleted film on the date of hand in. The price for the film and editing process will also cost me more than i can afford. Film: £30. Processing fee: £100.
The concept of this film with be a ‘Behind the Scenes’ of a Travelling Freak Show in the early 1900’s, having characters such as:
Two faced Lady
Clowns
The owner of the Show
The skeleton Man
Masked faces
I want the film to be a little eerie, filming in dark light and in a deserted location. I plan on filming in either a large field or deserted park, however for other cuts I plan on filming in a studio where I can use a curtain for a backdrop and LCD lights to give my characters more depth on screen.
I see most shits done a tripod, I won’t to keep to simple way of filming as they did in that time period, with also some slightly shaky hand-held shots.
My real challenge will be post production. I will be experimenting with Abdobe Premier Pro and possibly After Effects to give me that gritty and jumpy effect of old film.
My inspiration for this film comes from this photo taking back in the 1930’s of two clown simply looking into the camera.
What drew me to the picture was the humour and simplicity of the photo. Two clowns on their break from doing a show. At least that’s what I saw, anyone can look at this photo and imagine their own back story for these two men.
I am hoping when the audience see my characters in my film, they will use their imagination to create their own character out of what I have produced visually with short choppy clips, and a silent backing.
George Méliès was the first great fantasy filmmaker in the 1900’s, who created eye-popping visual effects at a time when directors still had to use natural light to make movies. He was famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the early days of cinema, experimenting in motion picture and it’s possible effects.
Known as a ‘stage magician’ and master of camera tricks, Méliès made more than 400 films from 1899 to 1912, the best of which combine illusion, comic burlesque, and pantomime to treat themes of fantasy in a playful and to some, rediculous fashion.
Everything in his movies is potentially animate; all objects and landscapes are in a state of flux. Statues come to life, monsters turn to flowers, a palace rises out of the floor, the queen of hearts walks off an out sized playing card and vanishes in a pillar of orange fire.
If humans appear as puppets, the rest of the cosmos is shown civilised and humanistic. Originally, many of Méliès’s prints were hand-coloured, object by object and frame by frame, giving the films a shimmering, stained-glass quality.
The magic was mechanical. Mixing flat with solid props, painted backdrops and ‘trick’ layered shots, Méliès’s complicated sets are filled with moving parts and special contraptions such as pasteboard palm trees, sliding panels of foliage, humanoid monkeys, dancing skeletons and a mechanised smoke-breathing dragon.
Méliès wrote, directed, produced, distributed, built the sets for and performed in his films himself. Despite his self-related mode of production, his was for a time France’s leading film studio.
Being a Frenchman Méliès started filming by documenting life in Paris. But thanks to an accidentally jammed camera, he learned that if different scenes were stitched together your eyes fill in the blanks and experience the film as one continuous story. Méliès combined this discovery with his knowledge of magical illusions and created the first generation of cinematic special effects.
Méliès’s ‘trick films’ worked because our visual system has built in shortcuts for motion detection. All of our senses are wired to detect change and ignore things that stay the same. Tricking your eyes into seeing motion isn’t enough to create a good film though. Méliès pioneered film editing for the purpose of telling visual stories rather than just documenting reality. His films popularized cinema in a way no other filmmaker had ever achieved up to this point in history because Méliès created stories that could only be told in film.
Méliès’s most celebrated image, known to millions who have never seen any of his movies, is a close-up of the man in the moon smacked in the eye by an exploratory rocket ship. This film was named, ‘A Trip to the Moon’/ ‘Le Voyage dans la lune’.
A recent Martin Scorsese film, focusing around a homeless boy who lives in a train station in Paris, has a slight turn of events. The first half of the 2011 film and especially the promos made Hugo look like a happy kids’ adventure movie. Which in a sense it is…at first. But the film’s second half takes a delightful left turn when it turns out that the grouchy old toy-shop owner is actually Georges Méliès.
Scorsese carefully recreates the set of several Méliès films, conjuring a time when directors could actually direct while the camera was rolling. In the process, he also plays snippets of several famous silent films, including Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and the Lumiere Brothers’Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
Some would say it is almost impossible to explain to an average filmgoer why silent films are magical. How the lack of dialogue actually makes them seem so unlikable actually makes them universally enjoyable across cultures and generations. The best silent movies such as the eternally weird ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, or absolutely anything Buster Keaton did in the 1920’s seem to deny the need for sound. I found that Hugo seemed to captures all that perfectly.
At times, you almost get the sense that Scorsese kind of wanted to make Hugo a silent movie with the extended prologue playing out without any dialogue. Filming in 3D, Scorsese is embracing rapid technological change even as he stops to salute Méliès and romance technology’s past. Scorsese has of course been a great believer and backer for the preservation of old movies, and in the last scenes of Hugo he recreates Méliès’s films, only now rendered in the most modern 3D technology. Scorsese is drawing past and present together in a way that could make perfect sense to some moviegoers.
After seeing Hugo, I was definitely encouraged to research George Méliès and dig a little deeper into his many other films and other silent films during that era.
Auguste and Louis Lumière were French inventers and excelled in the pioneering of motion picture, credited with capturing the world’s first motion picture films and holding the world’s first public screening.
The Lumière brothers were pioneers of the commercial cinema and despite their success and radical technological foresight, the Lumière brothers did make one miscalculated forecast, curiously quoted as having said, “The cinema is an invention without any future.”
The Brothers began making their films in a rented basement room at the ‘Grand Cafe’ in Paris. The presentations are alleged to the first time an audience paid to see a film screening. One of these films, L’arrivee d’un train en gare de la Ciolat both fascinated and horrified audiences. The film simply showed the arrival of a train at a station, it is said the audiences jumped out of their seats with fear of seeing the train roaring towards them from the distance. The Lumiere Brothers called these films ‘actualities’ or documentary views where the static camera simply records whatever action is in front of it from beginning to end.
The 2011 film ‘The Artist’ is a great example for what my main goal of this project is about. With director Michel Hazanavicius and his team, we see a recreated 1920’s Hollywood movie, filmed completely in black and white and (mostly) in silence.
Reaching beyond what is essentially a romantic comedy, ‘The Artis’t is more of a love song to the long-ago age in Hollywood and American cinema. With this film shot entirely on location in Los Angeles, it is has seamless winks to classics of the silent era and beyond scattered throughout including Citizen Kane, Singing in the Rain and The Apartment. With a budget of 15 million USD, it can boast precise production design and cinematography that recreate a playful 1920’s ‘Old Hollywood’.
‘The Artist’ follows the fortunes of a silent movie actor, George Valentin, who is unable to adapt to the new era of film: talking. But the film also seeks to draw attention to a style of acting and film production that was lost in our hunger for technological advancement.
Watching the film it became clear that with the shift from silence to talking we lost not only a style of acting and a particular kind of comedy, but also a way of listening to music.
For the first cinema audiences live music played by an orchestra or pianist filled the void left by people’s voices. Music had to take on the role of words in setting the scene, conveying emotion and even explaining plot. In other words the music wasn’t just background noise but as vital a part of the film as the central character.
The cinematography in this film is outstanding when it comes to recreating an age Hollywood film. However the costumes also had a big role to play. The Designer of these wonderful costumes, Mark Bridges, had this to say in an interview with ‘clothesonfilm.com’:
“First I did a research book for Michel (Hazanavicius, director) that illustrated the script scene by scene, just using images that I found that evoked certain moments in the film. Then I watched as many silent films that I could. I wanted to see how clothes were worn, the hemline lengths and accessories and observe the subtle changes in fashion from year to year. Michel loved the films Sunrise, and City Girl and The Crowd for their emotional tone, but for me I used the films It and Our Dancing Daughters for Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) research.”
In the early days of film it was customary for actors to wear their own clothes, whether this was because of the budget or not. After watching this film many times over, I feel to recreate just as this team has with a 1900’s era film, I will need to focus mainly on cinematography, location/sets and costumes when making my 1900’s era film.
In this project I will be researching early film-makers such as the Lumiere Brothers and George Melies, using Tom Gunning’s text ‘The Cinema of Attraction’ as my guide through this project.
I am hoping to create a short film to challenge myself in film making as i would in the early 1900’s. I feel we are privileged in this age with the technology that is available to us so i think it will be very interesting to see not only how difficult it would be to change the way i personally make films but how tempting it would be to use modern technology to make the film into more of what i imagine, which a lot of software easily helps us with.
In 1986 Tom Gunning wrote his article ‘The Cinema of Attraction’, exploring early film (1906 and earlier) style and its reception.
In his writing Gunning says, early modernist’s writing about cinema often flowed in similar ways. They were curiously fascinated by the possibilities of cinema but overly frustrated with the direction it began to flow. As time went on, cinema began to take on the custom blueprints of other art forms, such as literature.
Gunning’s observation that film was potentially robbed of its immediate effectiveness due to the emphasis of narrative over visual implies that audiences would be less affected by narrative cinema.
Gunning opposes the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ to a cinema based on narrative constructions in a number of ways. Firstly, he argues that unlike the narrative form, “attractions address the viewer directly, soliciting attention and curiosity through acts of display.” Addressing the audience directly destroys any possibility of a voyeuristic viewing experienced. Instead it produces a very visceral viewing experience full of shocks and thrills. Gunning explains that, “As moments of spectacle, their purpose lies in the attention they draw to themselves,” rather than in the development of narrative devices such as “characterization, narrative suspense, and the creation of a consistent fictional world”.
For this project, i have decided to do a ‘carnival’ themed piece being inspired by my experiment filming through a martini glass, giving the illusion of colour and shape.
Carnivals running in the early 1900’s and in modern day are very similar, besides the freak show acts, the shows are colourful, dramatic and overwhelming a lot like being in a dream. I will be comparing early film to modern film, looking at the technology used and how we tell the story.
I will also be going back to Tom Gunning’s, The Cinema of Attraction and George Melies, and how dreams were a large part of inspiration for storylines, costumes and actions.
Adding sound to my film took a lot of experimenting, downloading different sounds and soundtracks that i thought would work with the flow and setting.
I decided on carnival music. Not the fast paced, happy music that excites you but the dark, slow and moody theme that gives you shivers. This is to go with the pace my camera was going and the way the colours mould into each other. Watching the film with the music almost gave me a sense into a character who was experiencing a problem with his/her sight, maybe on drugs or being spun around again and again. Not being able to make out what you are seeing can be a little discomforting, so i felt the more moodier the music the better.
For this project I wanted to try and mess with colour and make them blend into each other. By doing this I used a Martini glass, pointing the camera on my phone down the centre. The rim of the glass made the colours churn against each other and the stem of the glass (the round part) made it look like you are looking down a tunnel. I tried various objects such as empty plastic and glass bottles but I found they didn’t have that much of an effect.
To achieve the different colours i laid out as many coloured objects around me that i could find, mostly a vase full of red flowers and various perfume bottles which boasted bright colouring.
I also used to the light from the window to see if a single colour could be and found that it did effect and manipulate the other colours surrounding it.
two clown simply looking into the camera.
Lydia A 