Connor Mitchell - Reflective analysis

 SHUTTER - REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS - CONNOR MITCHELL
Role(s): Director, Costume and Make-up, Risk Assessment, Location Scout, Producer.

Our film was called ‘Shutter’ it was called this to connect to the actions of one of the characters who is taking photos of another, and because we believed it sounded very ambiguous and unpleasant compared to our first title name ‘Infatuation’ which we thought was too direct. The film is a thriller, we chose this as we thought using camerawork to create suspense would be very interesting and show off what we had learnt within the classroom about directing techniques.

The plot of the movie follows a boy taking photographs of a girl who is smoking, before following her home, where she does her regular activities before going to bed, which is when he sneaks in and takes photographs of her. 

The titles in the movie are very blocky and wide with a French look to them, like the titles of the movie ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’, which I took as inspiration since it is also shot like our movie. 

We wanted the movie to be speechless as to leave ambiguity, the boy who is photographing her isn’t given a motive which I think makes him much more frightening. We used an over the shoulder shot then pan round to the front of the boy as his introduction into the movie, so first shown from behind to depict his actions of taking photographs but then panning round to his front, showing his face and giving him an identity. 

 We used a high quality SLR camera to photograph the girl, so during the actual opening it would show the images he had taken of her, I took this idea from the television show ‘Skins’ which used this technique to change the interpretation of the photographs taken of her from perverted to artistic and pure, so I hoped to create that here and give the character some 3-dimensionability.

We used quick cuts in the movie to express the female characters movements as she walks home, instead of an awkward cut or a very long take; we just chopped up the footage of her walking to show how far she had gone. When she got home we tried to show her doing very regular things, like reading a comic book, watching a movie and eating. We rarely used a tripod in the movie; we did this to create the almost documentary feel created by directors like Darren Aronofsky. The ‘shaky-cam’ feels very real life so we wanted to implement that into our movie making. 

We had a short jump cut in the garden to represent that something wasn’t right when she was lighting her cigarette, after finishing it she goes inside and stretches, where the main character takes photographs of her. With inspiration from movies like Children of men we had a long following shot of the boy taking photographs of her then moving to the backdoor, entering and then going into her room and taking more photographs of her. The room had low key lighting not only since she was asleep but to represent the possible sinister intentions of the boy. As he takes photographs of her in her bedroom, but just before the movie ends, he moves the camera away from his face and looks down at her. I wanted the sort of ambiguous ending to create suspense and excitement for the next scenes in the movie, which is what the opening of a film should do, create excitement and intrigue. 

We used ambient sound in the movie to make the location more realistic in the field, with a couple recordings I did on site to give the film more realism, but the sound was always slightly reduced as to not be to overwhelming. We used the sounds of a shutter opening and closing on a camera on each photograph to represent that it was currently being taken there and then in the movie. 

In the end I was happy with the product. I believe both characters were realistic, having their own personality, the girl being the ‘every woman’ sort of thing and the boy having this complex infatuation with someone that he doesn’t even know. I think the camera features and sharp editing make the film feel very real and managed to put in the complete opening to a story without making it feel too grand or over the top. The one improvement I’d make would be the middle of the movie, when she is walking home I wish I used parallel editing to show him following her.

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