Night Journey Continued

An element of our finished piece that works well is the characterisation we establish and maintain. This was done in a number of ways, firstly, through considered voice over we were able to establish somewhat of a power relationship between the two characters. An example of this is the way in which the two characters are introduced to the piece, character one i.e. the scared man opens with polite conversation "do you live in Germany?" to which character two quickly retorts "what's it to you, in half an hour you'll be asleep, then I'll do what I want with you." Not only does this begin to inform the audience of the cannibal's intentions, it also, as I've said, sets up the notion that one of the characters is in charge over the other. The chosen reaction of character one furthers the characterisation being that we decided to use a clip of him looking visibly anxious, had we used one of him looking completely relaxed the result would be totally different. 

The fact that neither actors display any obvious 'acting' in the film made it hard to match any particular section of voice over to an appropriate clip, any acting they do perform is done with the eyes or small movements. As a result, therefore we thought it best to emphasis this and use these subtle movements to convey an emotion and make them make sense when coupled with the voice over.

Part of forming the character of the cannibal was to show him as aggressive and creepy as possible from as early on as possible, we decided to introduce him using a close up, the rational being that it show cased an intense personality, something we wanted to establish early on. Adding to this intensity and simultaneously making use of his eye and head movement, we decided to synchronize the moment his eye's fall back on 'the scared man' with the line "I'll do what I want with you." By doing this, not only does it make it obvious that the cannibal is talking about the other passenger but it also suggests clarifies which character is meant to be the one talking. As the same voice actor was used to voice both characters I wanted to avoid any confusion as to which one was speaking. 

    

As the right line falls, the cannibal turns his gaze back into the camera.

Below is another example of where I matched the voice over to the cannibal looking back at the scared man. In this scene, the actor leaves frame while supposedly the cannibal is still talking to him, just like before, to clarify who's meant to be speaking. When the line "Your educated you should know that" is heard, this is the moment when the cannibal looks back in the direction of the scared man that just left. 

Aside from making use of eye movement, we made the most of any obvious body language to make the scenes of internal dialog more believable, as well as making it easier for an audience to accept the two people are really conversing. Further to this, I made the conscience decision to, where possible, avoid using clips where the actors mouths were moving. Not only do I believe that non-synchronized speech looks comical and therefore would take away from the serious tone I was trying to achieve but secondly, it's impossible for an audience to watch out-of-sync speech and believe the words they can hear are the words coming out of the actors mouth. In that sense, a result of the voice overs seeming to be some kind of internal speech, it's making it easier still for the audience to believe the conversation is actually happening.

The two screen grabs below illustrate how I used the motion of the cannibal leaning forward in order to initiate a conversation, again adding to the realism of the scene. The second image is when he leans back, cuing the end of the conversation. It was also my intention here to further characterize the cannibal, generally speaking, to lean back in a chair in the way he does suggests a confidant and relaxed demeanor. This juxtaposes the voice over as its at this moment when he passes comment on how tough ears are to eat, being so relaxed when talking about such things is a big indication to the audience as to what kind of character he is.        

Cut in-between the shots above is one of the scared man's reaction to the comments being made, once again I wanted to make use of subtle eye movement to better convey his emotion. Just after the cannibal explains how he sucks the eyes I cut to a clip of the scared man just before he gulps and closes his eyes as if in reaction to what he's heard.   

A big issue and one that was quite limiting was making sure not to break continuity too obviously. The hardest aspect of this was the transition from night to early morning as there are very few clips where its visibly day time. To get around this I colour corrected one of the hall way shots to loosely match the colour tone of the shot that follows it. While its not perfect, its better than inexplicably jumping from midnight to early morning in one cut. 

The screen grabs below illustrate the effect of the colour correction. The main difference is the reduced 'green' tone, by dragging the 'whites' closer towards blue, the colour temperature was lessened and gave the impression of it being morning. 

The end of the film makes use of a long piece of voice over that wraps up the narrative and concludes the journey. The problem was that there wasn't a clip long enough that fit the requirements we needed i.e. to be at morning and to include only the scared man. To get around this issue I used the motion of a train rushing by the window in conjunction with a cross fade to hide a cut. The fact that the light outside the train increases daily significantly isn't noticable and if anything helps portray the passage of time and the coming to an end of the journey.

The beginning of the end: A slow pan to the window

This is where the camera finishes moving and the state of the light outside the train 

This is the moment were the train comes into frame and the cut occurs

This is the lighting once the train has passed, noticeable when compared back to back but not when watching the film

The use of a cross fade blends the two clips together and helps to hide the cut

As part of the narrative we wanted to include a dream sequence, we tried a few techniques in terms of making it as clear as possible that what the audiences were watching was a dream. Speeding clips up and fast paced cutting of flashing images are elements that feature in the finished cut however it wasn't until we began experimenting with the layering of images did it begin to look as we wanted it to. We knew we wanted to include the footage of amsterdam as there it would be his visit to the city that he'd be dreaming of, then as the dream progresses the cannibal enters the dream. We weren't afraid to recycle clips that we'd already used as it was thought that it would be more believable if he was dreaming about events that had recently happened to him. Some of the more fantastical footage like the skulls for example were also used to emphasis his hysteria and delusion. 

As the dream progresses it gets more and more extreme, first highlighting amsterdam, then introducing the cannibal character and finally using clips containing the skulls along with further sinister clips of the cannibal, showing his teeth for example.  

The sound had to match this mash up of dream like footage and this was done by overlapping sections of voice overs, employing that all this was running though the scared man's head all at once, better conveying a sense of panic.