Post-Production Review

Reflective Analysis

  My research essay’s focus film was Inception. As I explored some other films by the director Christopher Nolan, I discovered there was a recurring theme deception and self-deception, the problem of reality and delusion.

 From my previous readings I found the novel ‘The Nightmare’  (1966) by Mihaly Babits. He tells a story about a shared soul, in other words, the case of a boy, who wakes up every morning in a different body and when he falls asleep he’s back again in the original life. Although Babits focuses on the clash of poverty and wealth, I decided to make a free adaptation, which breaks the chains of the original historical background. My intention was to create a video which is concerned with dreams and the theme of losing the ability to distinguish reality from imagination. Jean Baudrillard describes this as one of the various symptoms of the postmodern simulacra, which theme is linked with the films I discussed in my essay, such as Inception.

  My biggest challenge became, that the story I chose hasn't been visualised before, therefore I had very few leads and principles I could follow. I was also trying to grab a more feminine side of the story, taking Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch as a main example. It is unclear if Babydoll's hallucinations are due to her medication received in the mental institution, or come from her rejection of reality after the accidental murder of her own sister. However, she shows incredible bravery and selflessness. The distinction between reality and imagination often blurs, but a certain 'colour code' helps the viewers to cope. The real world is quite dark, greyish, while the first layer of dreaming is slightly more colourful but still contains references to reality, and the second layer is just absolute fantasy with monsters, dragons and spectacular fighting scenes.

 I kept the idea of the dead heroine addressing the audience informally in an opening voice over. However, I chose slower pace editing with less action involved, so the opening sequence leads all attention to the two main characters. The voice over is entirely original work, it wasn't part of either the book or any of the studied films. We worked in it together with the actress who performs it. It is interesting that she never appears physically on screen, but she is the inner voice of both characters. Of course the viewers wouldn't realise it for the first watch, they would probably make assumptions whose voice it is, but this audio effect still creates a weird sensation as if the body didn't match the soul.

  The intention was to create confusion in the audience through the mismatching of the casualty of the mise-en-scène and the surprisingly serious subject matter of the voice over. The genre floats between drama, sci-fi and psychological horror, which hybridization reinforces the postmodern element. I wanted to make the viewers feel uncomfortable, as if they ended up at the wrong corner, to reflect what the character might feel being extraordinary. I made the boundaries of the genre stretch out enough to be unusual, but stay on an acceptable level.

  Of course, it wasn’t always problemless to go through planning and productions. The plot has gone through many changes. For a certain period it was going to be a story about twins, who fight over each others’ lives. My influences came from drama and horror for this version, such as Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) and the TV-series Ringer (2010-11) starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is about the internal struggles of a young girl against familial and sexual oppression. Aronofsky takes a rather masochistic approach to ballet. The price of stardom is incredibly high: who wins the fight for perfection is a question of life and death. Ringer is about the fight of two twin sisters, who both try to replace the other one in their seemingly  perfect life, but none of the can escape their real problems. However, I through this idea away and returned to the original. On the way I had to change one of the main actresses, and because of the short time I ended up filming myself for a sequence.

 The musical choice was a very crucial part of both production and post-production. The song Girl With One Eye by Florence + Machine is filled with such elemental anger and pain, it almost sounds as if someone just pulled the cork and let the ghost out. In instrumentation it is close enough to folk to connect with the natural environment, but modern enough ‘not to hurt the audience’s ear’. The length of the song also matches the voice over.

  I also took visual ideas from Memento, such as the black-and-white picture opposed to the coloured, which indicates different time periods within the video. I also included the company logos to give the stronger sense of an opening sequence, which I took straight from The Dark Knight Rises, as the grey and black colours match the black-and-white images in my video, and also establish a dark subject matter right at the beginning. Another visual reference to Sucker Punch is the closing up at the beginning. Although I made slight changes, because in Sucker Punch the camera shows a theatrical stage, which becomes the scene of various key actions in the film. In my version, I focused more on the personal connection with this object: it was physically in the room as proof of reality, but also symbolises the Cage, as Life itself, in which the character is trapped just as the candlelight in the lampion.