I, Divided: Evaluative Analysis
As the designated writer upon commencement for a short project to set course brought many thoughts and visions.
My aims were to create a compelling crime drama with depth and intrigue to be both thought provoking along with being visually engaging and psychologically toying for the audience upon witnessing the final piece. Once an idea was crafted along with proposal and treatment being completed came the script to be completed to be met with the deadlines of the production schedule.
This presented a complication in of itself, as I wanted my piece to be both compelling and exciting along with suspenseful required me to quickly endeavor to create a finished script in short time in order for our crew to be ahead of schedule to allow more time to shoot. The problem here was initially my lack of imagination of thought process which hindered my hopes of completing the script in time, however I overcame this complication by re-reading my original source material which was the book by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled ‘The strange case of Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde.’
Upon reviewing the book once more allowed me to forge ideas for characters goals, ambitions, intentions and objectives and thus enabled me to write the script so that each scene a character would have an objective to meet and/or a point to project. This made my writing of the scenes a much more realistic and fluid process as I placed myself in the characters positioned and simply spoke how I would speak and then wrote the script and story using that specific formula.
Visual aids however were another entity entirely, I had multiple existing products which enabled my idea to be inspired beyond the original source material by means of presenting an intriguing story using styles adopted by existing films however telling a similar story to my created one. This was so during the shooting process using examples of scenes from these films focusing on similar character scenarios to the ones in ‘I,Divided’ can help efficiently project the story using an already successful formula developed by existing and acting film makers.
The following inspired ‘I, Divided’
‘Fight Club’ (1999) Directed by David Fincher
‘Shutter Island’ (2010) Directed by Martin Scorsesse
These existing films helped craft the element of psychological turmoil and dismay surrounding the existing character, Fight Club focusing on the element of a person suffering split personality. Shutter Island focusing on the leading character questioning his perceived reality and psychologically breaking outcome, taking the audience on a ever changing questioning environment as the story is intriguing enough to place the audience within the scene so much that the changing perspectives and realities insight the audience into questioning the reality they see projected by the leading character.
Once the script was completely written as a crew we sat down together and inspected the script for not stand alone grammatical errors but also errors in story, character and continuity. Ideally we wanted the story to be perfectly rounded off aside from the undecipherable and ambiguous ending of whether Henry Survived or not and if he did who came back, Henry or his more sinister personality Cain. The only problem we encountered with this phase of pre-production would be the enormous length of the script which accumulated to a total of 68 pages. To overcome this we decided to produce a teaser of the film for institutional means and then to create the rest of the film to submit to the London BFI film festival which is to be taking place in October of 2015.
Once locations had been selected and the script had been finalized we then ventured to these locations and shot scenes for I,Divided under the scene names of ‘Prologue’ and ‘Scene 1, pt 1′ . We shot these scenes and still enabled ourselves to have enough time to edit our piece to perfection ready for submission.
Overall, I feel that the piece we created was exceptional as I feel we captured the intrigue of the characters to set the foundations for an inquisitive audience to return for the rest of the film. I feel the scene was intense for its ambiguous nature and overall setting. I feel that the only downfall of this teaser piece is the audio, sound levels above all present a problem upon viewing due to changes in audio levels. However given the location we had luckily acquired the environment we had found ourselves did not fully compliment the scene we were shooting as we had desired nevertheless these atmospheric sounds could not be altered as we were in a work and corporate work space for our prologue scene.
Our woodland scene being scene 1 was not completed hindered by means of sound, for the atmospheric sounds that accompanied the scene we used to our advantage by means of the diegetic sounds within the scene being real and further adding obvious realism to our piece.
