Treatment

Treatment - personal proposal (uncanny)

Log Line: A man walks down the stairs of a tall building with very claustrophobic surroundings and as he gets further down the doors on each floor begin to open and creatures pour out of them attempting to harm him.  

The protagonist (Chris) is walking slowly down a repetitive staircase with plain but haggard walls on each side, he is aware of how closed in he is and every door looks exactly the same. Chris becomes agitated as his eyes dart around looking for a clue as to what floor he is on and the surroundings are clearly causing discomfort. The lights begin to flicker erratically and Chris picks up the pace. At this point the doors begin to bang violently as he scurries past them until they are now bursting open just as he passes them. Breathless Chris begins to sprint down the stairs as the banging gets louder and the doors swing open wider and wider. The pace of the banging and flickering catches up with Chris and a grotesque clawed arm grips at Chris tearing a huge chunk out of his shoulder, he screams in pain but manages to contort his body and evade the assault. Gripping his arm he sprints as fast as he can stumble down the stairs being clawed at on every floor but too scared to look at what is attacking him. The light is getting darker as Chris' eyes begin to get heavy but he pushes through and adrenaline takes over. He now has no choice but to look at the creature that is attacking him, a hideous amalgamation of dark oily liquid with huge teeth, claws and glowing fiery eyes. Chris curses as he sees each creature in fear running as close to the inner wall as he can, ducking around and under the claws until finally the floor levels out and a doorway can be seen. Chris manages to conjure a final burst of speed and throws himself head on through the oily creature and the front doors of the building crash open with Chris finally safe he turns back to look at the completely normal and unassuming building and touches his shoulder that no longer has a scratch on in.

 

The idea I have creates comes from walking through the stairways of large blocks of flats, specifically large communist buildings in Eastern Europe and finding it hard to distinguish one room or floor from another. It is a seemingly normal everyday thing but has a slightly mysterious nature to it. The fear of the unknown not knowing what is behind each door and the fact that the protagonist has no idea where he is in the film should convey this fear. The effects that would be on the day would be the injury and the doors banging/lights flickering and making the stairwell for Chris to run down. In the edit the creatures could be added and the illusion of a huge repetitive stairwell would be achieved by tricking the audience within the edit.

 

 

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell creates little boxes that look a lot to me like a small mood board. They all seem to have their own little mood and the use of materials is quite important to me. I think the best thing to take from this work could be the use of materials and specifically tones of wood as the wooden boxes can be influenced very much by the choice of wood it is cased in. We should consider the choice of materials and tones in the creation of our film. 

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman mostly does photography and film stills of women looking quite strange, almost deranged. I think the main aspect to this work for me is an element of subtlety in the strangeness of the photographs.

The photograph is not far from looking normal but small changes has made the picture look wrong and surreal, I like this idea of not going overboard yet still being able to achieve an effective change in mood.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapman Brothers. These artists mostly concentrate on themes of being vulgar, appalling or offensive as they like to try to shock their audience with the depravity of what they do.

I like the satirical style of these artists when then modify a normal every day object like a £5 note or above: a happy meal box. This is another example of how you can take something completely ordinary and make it something completely different. 

Joel peter Witkin

I thought that the article on The Lord of the Rings was really interesting and showed just how extensive art direction can be and the lengths film makers will go to realise their vision. The scale of the work done to create props and masks was incredible and so detailed.

I could not really see the relevance of the artist to this article if there was to be one as his art was mostly about death and corpses... often dismembered. Corpses and dismembered bodies instantly instil an element of dread into the people that see them so we could take visual influence from the artist in the characters within our film.

Sandy Skoglund

This artist from what I have seen appears to like making the ordinary extraordinary by multiplying it our using vivid contrasting colours.

This is a good example of that as this picture makes the cats seem quite menacing, strange, uncanny or dangerous. To me it shows how such a small change in an ordinary every day thing can suddenly change the mood of it. Also it is a good example of how you can use colour to set the mood of a scene or frame, colour being something we will have to consider for our film this year.

Tomoko Shioyasu

This artist cuts out tiny parts of a huge canvas and hangs them like a painting but projects light through the canvas and causes this picture above: The Blessing Wall. I think this is a good idea to create a very strange and wacky lighting style for a film because if we were to modify a light filter or shine light through shapes we could get some amazing and/or terrifying shadows into the film.

Chiharu Shiota

This Japanese artist creates a lot of instillation and photography work that contain the themes of past and present, life and death and objects that can have memories implanted upon them.

I like the idea of objects implanting memories out of Chiharu ideas because I thought the other themes in the work were so predictable and boring but this idea of memories was an interesting a slightly fresher idea to me. I chose this Picture above as my favourite to show this for a few reasons, firstly a lot of my childhood memories are of being in different cars that my parents had owned and driven but also the car I own is 42 years old and I thought that having been around that length of time it would have a lot of memories, some perhaps very interesting. I like the fact that this seemingly inanimate object can be tied in with hundreds of different events and memories even if it is not the focus of each memory.