Monday, July 11, 2011

Circumstantial Guilt

This was one of the first good concepts I had when deciding to get into the film industry. There are so many aspects of this video/trailer/idea that I love, it's hard to keep things short and sweet so I will just let you enjoy for now and maybe add some more details and info later.



One thing that happened almost accidentally during the prep work (cleaning and rearranging the house) for this trailer, was that weeks earlier I had brought down my large stuffed elephant (he has a larger body than I do). I was moving furniture, and he was still sitting on the couch and while I was moving him a phrase popped into my head, "elephants never forget". That became a visual recurrence while filming. In the finished product you only see the elephant once (sitting on the couch behind me, while I try to remember my past), but edited out in several scenes are pictures, statues, and even books with elephants placed throughout.

There is also a bookshelf that sits behind JES as she is at the computer. The shelf also got edited out, but on the shelf is a picture of the two of us that we had taken the day before at the park (we took about 20, almost all of them hit the cutting room floor). Also on the shelf was a stack of music books with a package on baby onesies on top of the books. That gives a little back story into the character of Jessica. She was once an aspiring musician, but then life happened (as it often does) and the dream and goal of becoming a violinist was soon covered/overtaken with the life of being a mother and having to care for a child.

The photographs we took at the park the day before we filmed, also had some good insight into the character of Joe. The pictures were telling the backstory of Joe and Jessica and how they met, fell in love, and bought their first house. Joe's t-shirts that he wore were symbols of what was really happening. They were all dark colored shirts, and I specifically picked certain ones out of my wardrobe to parallel those times in his life.
"I have no idea what you are talking about" (foreshadowing)
"Batman" (a guy who leads a double life)
"Bleach" (his memory being wiped clean)

That leads us into the character of Joe and what we see visually as he progresses. He starts out wearing dark clothes, and sports a beard. Beards I have heard are usually symbolic of guys trying to hide behind something. So when Joe is at the pool (and in the edited pictures) he is hiding A LOT. When he is in the hospital and thereafter, he is wearing lighter clothes, sometimes even white. I wanted to parallel the cleaning of the memory, and also make him almost angelic - because in his eyes, he has done nothing wrong, he's still "momma's little angel", so to speak.

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