Films and Stuff

A Portfolio of work and inspiration. And other things too probably.

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You Only Kill Once

In a world where everyone may kill one person in their lifetime, a woman has her home invaded by an unrelenting internet stalker.

I love the home invasion thriller sub genre of horror. I think really exciting stuff can be done there that produces visceral thrills for the viewer as well as a certain vulnerability. It involves an intrusion of our safest space after all. For this short script I did home invasion with a science fiction twist. I think it's a lot of fun and has a butt kicking strong female lead (pretty much essential in horror).

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Sinners

Two Con-Men posing as ghost-hunters get more than they bargained for when they come across a real ghost.

A comedy horror script. At 20 pages its a little longer and is of a larger scale than a regular short film. Budget went out the door for imagination and action here, though I think the film's "you get what you deserve" message really shines through still. 

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Christmas Lights

The story of an astronaut during the dying minutes of his connection to earth.

A 5 page long tale that works on action and visual rather than lines of dialogue. It has a very Spielberg crossed with existentialism vibe going for it with a neat little science fiction twist at the end. 

I think it's a really fun story.

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Inevitable: I acted as the editor and sound editor of this film whilst also assisting with colour grading and technical elements. Made over the course of about a month or two. The story had to be science fiction and with the fun of editing and a killer soundtrack we managed to put together a pretty nifty little time travel story.

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EVE: A Documentary

On this documentary I acted as co-director, interviewer, co-editor and assisted with technical elements. Assembled with Adobe Premiere this doco was a lot of fun to put together and turned out to be a fascinating insight into the exciting world of cosplay through the eyes of a professional young cosplayer.

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Two Faces, One Mind: A short doco about Drag Queens at the Imperial Hotel. Big thanks to Nikita van Der Kamp, The Imperial Hotel, and everyone else who helped us put this together. 

I acted as a co-director and editor on this project. Putting the whole thing together from 4 hours+ footage to tell the story of drag culture in Sydney and the personal story of one of the culture’s rising stars.

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Conveniences: A short film made in just 2.5 hours that I directed and edited.  The film is deliberately, I guess, artistic in nature to kind of make fun of the absurdity of art films. Making this film quickly proved a great challenge and taught myself and the team a lot about shot selection and general filmmaking practice. 

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EMBARRASSING: So we had to get strangers to confess their embarrassing stories on camera. At first i thought the exercise was a bit silly but i eventually got the point. It was a good exercise in approaching people cold and getting them to open up.

Most people weren't really willing it turned out, so finding people who were was quite difficult. This guy was quite talkative and willing to share his embarrassing experience which was good. He's really quite a lively character too which made film immediately more interesting. The big mistake was not getting inserts or cutaways to make the clip more interesting. Also we didn't find out until halfway through the story that the other guy was included too, so his inclusion is not as clean as we would have liked. Ultimately the story exceeds our technical failures but it would be nice to really get those right next time.

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Paper Chase: Our first in class project this semester was this, a short conceived, shot and edited in 1 hour about a girl chasing her lost piece of paper. 

The directions stated that we had to use 12 different shots (of any length) to tell this story. In the end we only hit about 9. This is for several reasons really, the first being that it was taking us a while to set up and decide on the shots we wanted. The second was the constant disturbances from people in the busy outdoor setting. The third is the difficulty in executing the shots how we intended we did several retakes to get things right which were worthwhile but also time consuming and we just didn't have the time to do that really.

I feel like we all contributed well though to designing some clever/interesting shots that helped make the simple story that bit more interesting. A real favourite of mine is the one where our lead chases the paper up the staircase.

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REMAKING THE START OF SCREAM

I was the camera operator, co-editor and co-director on this project. 

Our group has chosen to remake the first 5 minutes of Scream as part of our remake a classic assignment. For obvious reasons, Scream is an eternal classic of Horror Cinema. The opening is funny, scary and iconic. We're some ways into the process already so i'll recount some of the positives. Location wise, we're sorted. We have the house. Equipment is booked and ready to go. Shots are planned (not blocked yet, but that's soon) and casting has been an exciting process. We haven't officially decided on who will get the role yet, because we have a couple of options. Some of the main difficulties are the late shoot date and the cosmetic changes that are necessary. Our house is only available the week before the assignment is due, which shouldn't be a MAJOR problem, but means we have to work overtime in order to get the edit done. We plan on being super prepared for the edit, and know if we have many of the individual elements like sounds and tightly controlled takes from the shoot, we should have no problems reconstructing the scene. One of the biggest advantages is the fact that we're not devising the sequence out of our won minds, we do have a blueprint to follow should we get stuck. The cosmetic changes have to happen for the sake of making the filming process easier, and because our actresses don't have blonde hair (an unfortunate, but also kind of interesting change). The main phone for instance, will become an iphone. Luckily there's some precedent for this in Scream 4, where iphones and modern tech played a major part. In other words, things are coming along, its a little nerve racking. A little exciting. A little bit of everything really. 

[jacobs-port]

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS: A BREAKDOWN

Christmas Lights began as an idea that popped into my head many months ago. What happens if an immortal man gets found on earth? What would be the process the government would undergo to deal with him? My thought processes jumped straight away to space. Their last resort, in my opinion, after all the research was carried out, would be to send him as far into space as possible and hope he can discover new things that other humans would die of old age before they got to.

I felt the best way to tackle the restrictions of the 8 minutes (pages) and 10 lines of dialogue rules was to keep the immortal character (Adam) by himself and to play out his final contact with humanity in an almost real time basis. I find it both darkly hilarious and sad that a person, who has forever to live, can still have their entire life change in 8 minutes.

Keeping him alone and under pressure was the key to keeping the 8 page story going really. I think it was the best possible choice because it minimised my dialogue and added plenty of action. I worked out a way to replace dialogue and recorded sounds with text on screens, stickers and newspapers. This saved me a tonne of lines, and makes audience involvement a little more prominent I think. It’s up to them to take part, even if it’s just reading and interpreting a few newspaper headlines.

Christmas, the woman, the records and the newspaper wall were all ideas that struck me as looking good cinematically while also being a representation of his close desire to keep up human experiences. Most people would stop worrying about Christmas when there are no presents under the tree. Not Adam. I also liked the idea that he was given entertainment to do, but the entertainment is so behind because of when he left, he’s cycling through a pile of records that is now more than 100 years old because nobody could give him a stack of DVDs or tv shows to watch.

Keeping the action purely cinematic was one of the most difficult things about writing Christmas Lights. Trying to write a screenplay that was still substantial, but had no dialogue was a really odd experience that I’ve never actually tried before. At first it made me angry, I thought it was impossible. But in the end I’d say that I managed to latch on to how I could make the action flow and be interesting for large sections at a time. That’s not to say it was perfect, because it was so hard to try and keep the action from becoming ‘novelistic’. Fighting the urge to make Adam’s thoughts and feelings fill the action became the biggest strain. I think I managed to remove most of it, but there are some lines in there that I just couldn’t work out how to make subtle and implicit in the action and so had to spell it out.

The opening wasn’t quite as good as it could have been in hindsight. Instead of records being played, maybe audio recordings would have been better. Like the Christmas Tree and Lights I thought that the record player could be a close reminder of home and how this guy is still really attached to humanity. Instead I’ve come to think that maybe it would be better to have audio recordings of conversations with friends/family/other people to establish just how important the satellite dish is to Adam. The pillow lady, could be enough though, it shows an interest in human interaction and a longing I think, but the recordings could potentially work far better.

Dominique said the ending worked well, which was a massive relief. I tried to make his life and experience unusual and hard to determine throughout the script. The 60s décor thing and the newspaper wall were the sort of major clues. The 60s thing in particular I think, helped make Adam more ‘out of his time’. Ultimately I want audiences to sympathise with the moral wrongness of forcing somebody to act against their will (that’s the ‘inspiration’ I chose morally wrong. I hope the script raises questions of how far we’ll push science, and how far it’s worth pushing science. How far is too far really? Is it not this guy’s duty to help us find more about our experience? I also really like the idea that tis already happened, during the cold war (hence the 60s décor). I feel like this makes the most sense because this is essentially a time when humanity was at its most dangerous and most competitive. Cold War America would definitely send a man into space forever (Modern America probably would too though). 

[jacobs-port]

REMAKING A SCENE FROM WINGS OF DESIRE: In about 30 mins, we were able to devise a way of remaking a specific dialogue sequence from the film Wings of Desire. The scene features a guy talking to himself - but he can actually see an angel there that nobody else sees. We decided to twist it towards a person just talking to himself on a park bench, in a busy place. We racked our brains though for a greater reason for him to talk to himself outside of "he's a crazy person". One thing that has resonated with me lately is how crazy everyone looks talking to themselves on hands-free or whatever in public. It was a nice touch to give a little bit more humour to our scene and also cover up for my need to read the lines (plus my extremely average acting skills). When we shot it we tried to keep it as simple as possible, minimal cuts and keeping the field of view wide enough to see the reaction of someone else sitting on the bench. I find the simplicity and keeping movement of the scene to a minimum makes sense for a conversation with himself, especially with a phone call. People don't move around during their deep and meaningful phone conversations. Well sometimes they do but in our case they didn't okay? Also: excuse the background sound of people gabbering away, couldn't get rid of it. Thought it added a busyness to the scene though that contradicts the loneliness of the conversation.

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We played around with lighting in class last week. So while i never thought lighting was simple it was surprisingly tricky to manage meaning creation with light. You could play with angles for hours and hours and produced differently nuanced effects. Many of us were a little camera shy and therefore reluctant to jump in from of the light, but the bottle allowed us to explore the way light worked on inanimate, reflective objects. I love the effect of long shadows, it can be scary but it also adds depth. The gong especially felt like it had an extra dimension to it as we shone light on it every which way.  The curtains too provided an unusual backdrop for shadowplay. The ambient light of all the different lights in the room creating its own little display quite unintentionally. 

[jacobs-port]

SUNSHINE (2007): I don't care what anybody says about the 3rd act. This film is incredible. Never has science-fiction felt so chilling, so terrifying (except for Carpenter's The Thing) when the only enemy really is the humans themselves. It also deals with ideas I love, especially what i guess you'd describe as a quest to find god. The weird thing is that it (god)really is the sun all along. These sort of elements are really inspiring for my short film script. I want my lead character to real face/question his faith. Rather than faith in god though, i'm gonna go with questioning faith in humanity. It sounds kind of cliched but man, in my head some horrible things happen to my lead character and i'll be damned if he doesn't deserve the right to be disappointed. Sunshine does a fair bit with this too, especially the selfish aspects of who lives and who dies on a spacecraft running out of air. They then face an even bigger question, who is more important, themselves or humanity? I'm fairly certain my story is gonna be on a way smaller scale than this, just in case i ever want to make it for like, no budget. 

[jacobs-port]

TWINNING – A reflection on a Short film of digital pictures by Jacob Woodorth

Twinning (A combination of the words ‘Twin’ and ‘Winning’ that I’m not really sure why I chose) is constructed entirely out of photos from my youth I shared with my twin brother. The digitale task required pictures, mainly personal photos to be arranged to form a first person narrative storyline that had some sort of emotional resonance.

The story of Twinning is a fairly straight forward tale of my relationship with my twin brother. I tried to cover a simple arc that included why we’re different to the simple definition of the idea of twin as well as one of the most powerfully defining moments of our youth, that has silently shaped our relationship to each other today. My intentions weren’t to necessarily create a strict piece of genre work, to craft on out of the photos available was impossible. Instead I chose to follow through on emotional arc, one that may seem a little cheesy to some but actually rings true for me. I think by following through on our relationship in a 2 minute version of a ‘relationship drama’ it allows the audience to buy into why our brotherhood is maybe a little surprisingly unusual. The almost fantastical moment that forms part of the bond between my brother and I is also a point of interest for the audience because it’s the closest the film gets to including elements of the fantasy genre.

My experience with twins (besides my brother) is that they are often defined by society, their families, friends and even themselves by their similarities. Twinning arose from the fact that people are constantly taken aback with how separate our lives are and how subtly different we are from the traditional view of what the twin should be. I thought back over some of the most surprising facts of our relationship, particularly the fact that we went to different high schools and haven’t been in the same class even since Kindergarten. While this fact isn’t inherently interesting enough to carry a story itself it does add colour to it and helps to make our mos powerful ‘twin’ moment stand out to an audience as a powerful moment in our lives.

One of my main influences, that has impressed me for years before I even knew I’d be doing this assignment is the opening of (500) Days of Summer. Even though it uses a combination of both video and still images, the masterful combination of narration and glimpses of the characters’ youth creates a wonderfully nostalgic feel. I thin kthat’s where I was coming from in attempting an honest sounding narration, the authenticity of being there and the nostalgia of memory can really shine through if you get it right. I gave it a good shot I think.

I don’t have a tonne of photos of anything really, so choosing the right photos to craft the story was difficult. Likewise, the process of editing them together coherently with minimal experience in Adobe Premiere was also a challenge. The good thing about digital storytelling was being able to add sounds that added colour to otherwise only tangentially interesting images. Narration too allowed simple images to be unpacked or related to the viewer in a way that makes story sense. I would have liked to add more movement, but was uncertain about the possibilities of effects. Things I’ll be sure to play around with before my next edit. What is interesting about the process of narration is that it provides a fuller narrative experience, rather than attempting to make a tale that could be simply watched as a series of images that made sense I felt that making my story a combination of audio and visual elements would make it more effective.

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Script for Twinning Narration.

I didn't feel that formatting in film script form was necessary, because it was pure narration. Most of the photo change markers are here as they were originally sort of decided. Some changed a little. This is me as a baby. (1)

 And to the untrained eye this could also a picture of me. (1)

It’s actually my brother. Born 3 minutes before me on the 3rd of December, 93. Those of you with medical knowhow will probably realise that we are indeed twins. (2)

When most people think of twins, they think of clones, or the sisters in the shining. While mum did dress us up in hilarious ways, we’ve actually got pretty separate identities. (3)

He was into sports. He played golf in the backyard basically every day. (4) While he did this I played with my imaginary dog Sparky. (5) I have vivid memories of feeding sparky mud, while Gareth chipped golf balls around the yard into holes he dug himself. Gareth went on to play golf a lot in later years, before moving onto baseball. Sparky would later die after being hit by a truck in the street. There are no photos of this. Because that’s messed up and also Sparky wasn’t real.

Despite our different interests, there was always something keeping us together though that went beyond just similar age (6/7).

We have one story, our ‘Freaky Twin Story’ that is definitely the weirdest thing that’s happened to us. (8) At school, we were in separate classes and had separate groups of friends (9). One day, I’m playing in the playground with my friends when suddenly I get the worst headache I’ve ever had. I went to go sit down (10), when my class teacher walked up to me and said “I think I saw your brother go up to sick bay” (11) I thought alright, I’m feeling pretty bad I’ll go up there and see if its him. It was. He’d cut his head open on the corner of a brick wall (12). He wasn’t in pain at all though, no drugs or anything. His head wrapped up like this (13), except he was older and not wearing a nappy obviously. I was the one with the splitting headache that didn’t leave until he had his wound stitched up.

It was a textbook example of twin pain sharing (14).

Nothing like that has ever happened again (15). We went to different high schools, had kind of separate lives. This weird little moment stuck with us though, a constant reminder of our twiness. (16)

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Twinning: 

Assembled and Edited in Adobe Premiere.

Here it is, Assessment Task 1. The digitale was a combination of images of your own life, combined to tell a story. The best stories i could work out came from my own relationship with my twin brother. Picking photographs that matched the story and then manipulating them to do so was the most difficult element of the production. I think sound and narration really helped tie the whole thing together into pretty cohesive vision too. The wonders of digital storytelling really....