Surrealist FILM. Salvador Dali.

For this project it is imperil to be looking at how the surrealist used the camera and produced their work If me and my group want to put together a surrealist film.

I started by looking at Dali's work:

Spellbound.

Below is an extract from the dream sequence In the film...

Spellbound (1945), is a psychological mystery thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and it tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out to be not what he claims. Salvador Dali designed backdrops for a 20-minute dream sequence.

Spellbound was filmed in black and white except for one or two frames of bright red at the conclusion when a gun is fired. His job through producing this sequence was to conceive certain scenes of mental delusion. We have written the first bit of our treatment and the man it features at the beginning is in a weird state, almost passing out, so watching this scene of trying to communicate mental delusion in Spellbound is important in trying to gain ideas for our piece of work and understanding how to go about making the audience feel a certain way and understand how this man is feeling in our film.

The Surrealist.

Below is a piece by Dali, called the Surrealist, apart from being brilliantly weird, I think it shows how all these ideas in Dali's head were always about and I also think this is a good example if the sorts of ways to bring together sound and film in a surrealist way...

Un Chien Andalou

Below is a bit from Un Chien Andalou, it's a sixteen minute silent surrealist short film produced in France by Salvador Dali and the Spanish director Luis Bunuel. It was infact Dali's first film, and is one of the best known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920's.

The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial 'once upon a time' to 'eight years later' without the event or characters changing very much.

This idea of dis-jointedness is key in what we want to communicate to our audience through our piece and is really important in this idea of surrealism.

The piece below is he original film but someone has done their own music over the top of it, right at the end is the same look we are kind of going for in ours with the woman giving evil glances. The idea of the simplicity and special techniques they used is what got us really excited about the idea of making our own surrealist film, the eye cutting bit is true of this.

Below is another really famous bit from the film...

Some Surrealist Influence.

I've been talking to Rachel and Charlotte about the idea of surrealism and we're all pretty keen on trying to reproduce something along the lines of the idea of maybe a dream sequence piece, although we want to come up with a 'story', but we'd also like to take a surrealist approach to writing the treatment. Taking bits from short stories and maybe ding a free association game between ourselves. Examples: Taking first sentences from books to develop concepts, or possibly sat listening to music and writing a response of what we imagined to be happening, this would be good in then being able to apply some sound over our piece as we'd know what sort of things we needed to be hearing.

The options it seems we now have are:

- Take a short story and adapt it to be surrealist.

- Put together our own story through word assosiation.

- Take little bits, sentences from short stories and write some our selves.

The problem with free association is that it quite time consuming and we don't want to get bogged down in working on the story/treatment.

Our Idea for A Short Film...

I've always enjoyed watching black and white film or dream sequences done in a surrealist way, particularly the dream sequences by Salvador Dali. I want to explore these old camera techniques, which are stunningly done as I really enjoy how no CGI or modern techniques are used. The simple ideas in which are done through the filming and not through the editing process are really special.

Could possibly base the short film on a short story or a few short stories? However produce like a dream sequence, dis-jointed and use these old camera tricks.

I need to get some re-search together, I'm going to concentrate on:

- Surrealist techniques.

- Dali's Dream sequences.

- Short surrealist stories.

Initial Ideas for a Film...

My initial thoughts for any kind of film based piece would be stopmotion animation. But after exploring on youtube a bit and being shown old film and other bits and pieces, I have started thinking about producing some sort of surrealist sequence or story.

The things in film I really like are:

- Stopmotion

- High speed camera effects.

- Illustrated Animation.

- Cut away shots

- Using stills or little bits of film to represent a word.

Although I am really into the idea of stopmotion and illustration, I really want to understand the idea of film and cameras more and so I hope that in this project I get to work with the camera more and get a better understanding of it.

Strawberry Hills:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb9X5jMofEo

This is a video I came across...

Jape- Floating - Like the idea of slowed down movement. Epic.



The musics awful! But I like the way this is filmed.

Plastic Selves.

This is a short animation I put together at the end of my first year in Vis Com.

The brief I wrote was to challenge peoples perspectives and stereotypes of The Barbie Doll. Is she all good?

The idea for my animation came from my negative attitude towards the doll culture and how dolls and 'The Barbie' can bring fun and comfort to young girls, but how they can also create or be victimizing to females.

My animation challenges whether Barbie is a good influence on the young people that purchase them and provokes the idea that many young girls who are fed this unhealthy body image by Barbie, then go on to aquire eating disorders and even plastic surgery to get that idealistic look.

Looking back at it now....it's shockingly shit, but this was my first attempt ever at any kind of video. I learnt a lot throughout the process, like final cut express, after effects, how to manipulate the video equipment and how to approach a stop-motion animation in the correct way.