When I started my short film in November, I knew I wanted to make it based around something important to me. Identity is something very personal to a lot of people and a fact that I struggled with for years, so making the film, I wanted the theme of it to surround the topic of identity and discovering and learning about who you are through, what feels like, an incredibly repetitive series of events.
Going into research, I looked into time loops for the reason that they have been used to show character growth in films like Groundhog Day and reflect how I have felt at different points in time while figuring out who I am. Time loops are a fun way to show character development because the process can be repetitive, it often feels monotonous (as per the tagline of the film), but it does lead to something.
That’s why I changed the aspects of the loop as I went. The character learns more and more about themselves through repetition. Furthermore, the character repeatedly finding more information from the past loops or redoing things that happened previous with slightly different reactions, is trying to show what it can feel like to be someone who is struggling to know who they are.
The skull represents who she used to be and the change into who she is now. She reacts in fear the first few times because that change is scary but at the end of the short film had accepted the skull to be there and eventually accepts that she will become it at some point and it’s okay.
Identity is universal theme, so when it’s explained, I hope that it, on some level, connects with the audiences beyond just the surface of the film. That’s the reason why I chose not to explain the reason for the time loop, other than the time constraint. I feel that there’s not a good start or end to identity and, even though I researched conventions of time loops and their stories and most of them include some form of explanation or clear gimmick into why they start over, I broke that convention to better fit the theme. Audiences reactions may not be what I want, as they could reject the intended message about identity as per Stuart Hall’s Audience Theory.
While the skull is important in a thematic sense, its also important to the branding element as well. Skulls are a mysterious thing overall. We don’t know anything about what it’s like after death and that can give skulls a mysterious air about them. A skull lying on a beach with no clear explanation onto how it got there? More so. There aren’t any clear codes to show how the skull got there, leaving audiences wondering what happened to put the skull there. Who died and how? Why did they die? Enigma Codes like this can be a good sense of marketing, intriguing the audience and making them want to learn more.
The motif of the skull is found in both minor tasks, appearing in several Instagram posts and the post card since it has such a large part in the message of the short film and works really well to create a sense of intrigue and mystery. I used the typical conventions of the skull to create the mystery surrounding it and the promotional images to engage audiences.
Filming-wise, using techniques like the dolly zoom that are familiar to audiences keep them more engaged. The general story concept is also, what I feel, is a relatively unique one and since people like differences in their genres, stated by Neale, the differences in what starts off as what seems to be a regular pirate film could keep them engaged with the story more than ones that follow the formula. The dolly zoom is a convention created by Alfred Hitchcock used in a lot of media to show unease and I used it in my film for that exact purpose during final time loop. Trying to make the dolly zoom look correct without the proper equipment required more research and trials than I thought it would.
Another technique I researched was the Bokeh Effect, which I show in the beginning in a few of the different loops. The effect is used to disorient, like the dolly zoom, and I used it as such. The shift from shallow depth of field to deep depth of field shows how disorientation and confusion from the character who just woke up. It tries to mirror the fact that oftentimes, after waking up, the world feels out of focus.
Research also played into the costuming. I used conventions for the costuming and location to drive home the pirate theme, but challenged them by including a time loop, something that’s not normally found in pirate stories. When creating the costume, I looked into movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. While the costumes in that movie aren’t realistic to what pirates of the time period would have actually worn, they are associated with fictional pirates.
Elements like eye patches, poet’s shirts, and tricorn hats are staples in pirate costumes. While I used the latter two, I did not include the eye patch despite its convention as a pirate accessory. Part of the reason was for practicality - wearing an eyepatch throws off depth perception and can get itchy, and the other part was to challenge the conventions.
Eye patches are known as part of pirate outfits and could be distracting to audience and detract from the rest of the shot. I didn’t feel like the cloth eye patch matched with the rest of the outfit. The conventions I decided to use were used to create familiarity with the audience and make the character more recognizable as a pirate. The differences in genre and clothing conventions works to engage audiences by using something different than one hundred expected.
Elements from urban fantasy and science-fiction aren’t typically found in stories with classical media pirates. That could have played into branding as well, since the idea of the company centered around making films with messages that have become increasingly political in ways that are different. Another part of the brand was the inclusion of pirates, which were much more prominent in the project for this year than last year.
The company name, Starry Seas Media, came from my love of science fiction and all things nautical and pirate-y. It appeared a few times throughout the production process, since it was mentioned in the biography for my Instagram account, a few of the Instagram posts, in the final cut and the post card. Both the post card and the Instagram reference the film festivals, adding to the branding, and the final Instagram post works to both advertise Parley Through Time and File 43, last year’s project. These references, tied with the used and broken conventions, help engaged audiences.
Overall, social media is a good way to engage audiences. It’s accessible across the world and incredibly popular and common. Likes are dopamine inducing and posts/reels can be shared easily, reaching more people than just the intended audience. While my Instagram account didn’t receive as many comments and likes as I had expected, there was some evidence of positive audience interaction from the few comments and likes.
In a real world setting with an official project, I think the Instagram account could have gained more traction. There was no good way to put the private account out other than having people I knew follow and hoping they would comment. If the film was produced in a professional capacity, the account would have been public and could have had more engagement, since it would have a larger audience available. A larger audience could have a correlation with higher audience engagement with more people able to interact with the project.
Short film social media accounts are less trafficked than large companies, due to factors explained by Curran and Seaton. With the rise in conglomerates, small companies can’t produce as much and have it reach the same level of popularity. Social media algorithms rely on popularity and audience engagement. Without a large audience or a well known brand, there is little engagement and the account doesn’t gain as much traction.
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