Mine & Katie's Film 'Earth Man' explores the human condition in the natural world. It leaves behind the contemporary issues to do with man's negative destruction of the enviroment and instead looks at how man himself can become at one with the earth once again.
Our original idea was to create an experimental film that showed a flow of natural life interrupted by humans through the displacement of bizarre man-made objects in an outdoor setting.
We proceeded to plan and storyboard this idea in detail and this was filmed in Edale but with little success. We concentrated too much on the content rather than the cinematography and overall just didnt work.
We re-planned a film with a similar theme, but a more positive outlook and with a much more simpler content. With this in mind, we took camera's back out into a rural location and created 'Earth Man'.
Me & Katie worked on the planning stages together in both instances with the same vision and on set Katie filmed the shots with myself in, though I was involved in saying how I wanted certain shots to look. I also did camera work when it came to experimenting with the pull focus & close up's while Katie looked at how the camera could fuse with light.
In the edit suite, desisions were made together, sequences cut equally by us both and Katie worked with the effects, transitions & titles.
Katie & I were inspired by the work of Joe King & Rosie Pedlow, who capture changing enviorments without drastic movement or human involvement. We were also influenced by Emily Richardson's 'Aspect' which plays with detail amd light in a woodland using experiemental approaches to close up's and transitions. This is clear in 'Earth Man' where the detail in leaves and water are brought to the screen in close ups and pull focuses. We intentionally used over exposed shots and sun glare to create a tranquil, dream-like atmosphere and our pivotal moment comes when the protagonist and his enviroment are shown through this style to mark the moment when the man immerses himself in the earth.
Watching 'Earth Man' Katie & I both felt we could have made the turning point in the film much more powerful; at present it is just a change in cutting speed and euphoric colour, though we feel these shots add to the surreal moos of the film and the hypnotic way in which the world is taking the 'Earth Man' in. At times the cuts seem a bit disjointed, and we feel that maybe we should have planned better how the shots would fit together, especially where a moving cuts to a still. We played with the manual focus a lot and this works in some sequences, but perhaps we overused it. Apart from that, the film suffers in a small way from a slightly weak narrative structure, though we have done our best to structure the man's journey chronologically and at times we see a small wobble of the camera - a case of poor attention on set.
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