In Flames

A short film I shot with my sister over the course of two evenings with a little bit of help from my brother. Shot with my Canon 700d and using mainly candlelight to illuminate my sister and the environment I wanted to create an intimate yet gothic feel, just to mix the feelings of closure and vulnerability (which often go hand in hand in young people's first relationships, which is what the film is in part about), whilst also creating a cinematic aesthetic, drawing inspiration from films like Stanley Kubrick's 'Barry Lyndon' (1975) or 'The Innocents' (1961). I used whale-song as an ambient underscore for part of the film to build on the sense of an ominous yet self-contained environment, whilst also trying to give a background impression of loneliness, drawing from a moment in the documentary 'Blackfish' (2013) where an orca is snatched from his family at sea and is then housed in a tank barely big enough to fit him at Sea World, and in this tank he sends out long distance calls (that sound like whale-song) hoping that his family at sea will hear them and come to rescue him.