LONELY

September 2020

Experimental short film

Project Overview

This is an experimental short film. I tried to depict the weekend life of a woman living alone in a modern city by shooting in real life.

This is also an assignment of MOME709, which takes about 3 weeks to produce.

Concept

At the time, the assignment for this issue of MOME709 was to depict a full-fledged character using photographic representations. In addition, dubbing and large amounts of text should not appear in the video. At that time, I was living in a rented house in China and doing my homework while doing my internship. So the first idea that came to my mind was to portray a busy and lonely figure in the modern world. The use of female images is because women are vulnerable groups in the society, and the number of girls with poor social skills is more than that of men.

After the shooting content was established, I immediately wrote a script for the shooting, which was as follows: On an ordinary weekend, a woman who had just come to work in the city and lived alone returned home after shopping for food. Her edges had not yet been smoothed by the city’s harshness, so she wanted to change her introverted and socially awkward side. She poured out her regular coffee and took wine from the refrigerator to cheer herself up. She was conflicted, healing with the piano and solidifying her desire to get out of the house and into the center of the city. So the heroine went out of the house after taking a bath and making up. However, the moment she opens the door, the timid character of the heroine takes over again. She is afraid of change and doesn’t know how to change. So the heroine went back home and sat in the doorway looking at the city sky.

I wanted the tone of the whole video to be melancholy and sad, so I used a lot of fuzzy shooting techniques to show it. On the one hand, it avoids the unprofessional performance of the actors, and on the other hand, it allows the audience to imagine the inner thoughts of the protagonist instead of just staying on the face. At the same time, I chose a low and soothing piano music as the background music for this video, aiming to set off the sad atmosphere.

Moodboard

I inquired about the shooting techniques and shooting angles in many movies that show lonely and melancholy characters. But at the same time, I don’t want to present the tone of the whole video as extreme loneliness and sadness. I hope the protagonist still tries hard to change his mind after he fails. So I changed the tone of the video to be slightly darker rather than overexposed.

Shooting Process

I rented a house with a garden for the shooting, because I wanted to express the feeling of the protagonist going out of the house but finally coming back to the house. The ordinary Chinese building style is not suitable. In addition, at that time, I also wanted to shoot some scenes where the protagonist went back to the room to show his inner struggle, but the overall tone and environment did not match the rest of the film. At the same time, due to the limitation of the video time required by the homework, many shooting scenes that I thought were good were not adopted, such as several scenes in the right picture.

Final Scenes