Evaluation

Alternatively, you can view it here.

Key Frame Commentary

Frame 1

Frame 1

This initial frame changes from how I originally wanted to take it. I originally described the effect I wanted to create as:

"Jake waking up from his sleep in a blank, minimalist room, with a monotone colour scheme. This would be an aerial close-up shot, placed above the character, to show his eyes opening suddenly and the order of the room."

Upon viewing the above keyframe, we can see that this is not the created effect as I realised that with financial and time limitations (due to being a student and other deadlines), finding and/or creating a minimalist room was harder than initially thought. Instead, I used the natural look and feel of my actor; Shivam's room. His room showed a lot of traits that I found to be commonplace around the age group of the character of Jake. I left the room as is; except a few changes such as darkening out windows with sheets, to give it the natural feel of a used room, that was still clean and orderly. I also placed a light out of frame to the right to remove any harsh shadows and remove the negative, giving a softer image.

Frame 2

Frame 2

For frame 2, I decided to go for a more isolated feel, putting Jake alone in a long shot. This, rather than the inclusion of moving vehicles within the frame makes the scene feel very slow and lifeless, potentially alluding toward the lack of exuberance in Jake's life.

Frame 3

Frame 3

Jake sitting alone, looking out to the window. This suggests his loneliness and isolation from the rest of the passengers on the bus. His looking out to the window, which is much brighter than where he currently is, could suggest that he's  not content with his current life, or that he's pondering a thought.The amount of blue tones in the scene suggest that; either way, it's sad.

Frame 4

Frame 4

A speeding car (imposed in photoshop) speeds toward Jake as he crosses the road, unbeknownst to him. The headphone shown in his ear closest to the camera shows that he did not hear the oncoming car due to him listening to music. The blurring in the distance was added in post to create suspense as the car looks as if it's out of Jake's field of view.

Frame 5

Frame 5

The reflection of the car in Jake's eye was also added in post, to create reason for the shocked expression that is apparent to the audience. This was also colour-corrected in post, to create realism, despite the eye photo being taken indoors.

Frame 6

Frame 6

This frame was manipulated to alter the colours, making them a colder, more mysterious tone as well as the shallow focus being added in. Due to my camera dying before shooting a few of my keyframe images, I had to adapt and use my smart phone, meaning I couldn't create a lot of the effects I wanted without the aid of image manipulation software. I feel this shot really captures the depth of the scene and creates mystery and suspense for the viewer.

Frame 7

Frame 7

Frame 7 alters from the original image that I wanted to create. In the final frame,  we can see that Ezraeil's hand is glowing upon contact with Jake's face. I felt this left more questions in the mind of the audience and disorientated their experience of the keyframes, questioning as to why Ezraeil's hand glows like it does. The shot is cold and the flesh tones are pale, alluding to spirits or the paranormal.

Frame 8

Frame 8

In this frame, we can see Jake in bed again. This time, the colours are much colder due to the use of a blue colour filter on my light, than a yellow/orange one. This is enhanced by the fact that this is the only strong light source in this shot, casting deep shadows and creating the image of a night time scene. The mise en scene suggests a more disorderly state of mind, with the sheets scrunched underneath Jake.

Frame 9

Frame 9

This image went exactly as planned, with the recurring blue colour scheme setting a darker, colder feel - contrasting heavily from the bright pale light that spill from the lamp just out of frame. The numbers on the bottom, glow eerily projecting the time onto the frame. This was all achieved using physical lights on set, combined with post production to add things such as the lit joint, timestamp and colour correction.

Frame 10

Frame 10

Key frame 10 also followed the plan for the shot. The dim blue light in the room illuminates only one half of the frame. The dutch angle in which the photo was captured makes the viewer feel uneasy, as well as depicting the struggle that Jake has with his state of mind. The hue shift in the back wall(s) of the room create the same effect, making this entire shot feel disorienting.

Frame 11

Frame 12

Frame 12

Frame 12 is, in my opinion, the frame most effective at capturing emotion. The high contrast between light and dark colours represent Jake battling conciousness (light) and fainting (dark). The blue in this scene also suggests sadness, which bodes well with the events depicted. A dark vignette encompasses the frame, settling on Jake. This makes the frame feel very claustrophobic and creates the idea of his eyes closing as he faints. Behind him is a very ordinary household, showing that even in his own home, he can't escape his demons. This frame suits the series of keyframes very well in my opinion.

Frame 15

Frame 15

In this frame, I diverted away from what I had originally planned. At first, I had thought that having my two characters standing still amonst a crowd of people rushing would be most effective. However, I found this hard to replicate, and; due to time constraints, altered my scene so that the two main characters would be standing alone against a background that was empty and blurred, making them appear 'far away from reality' and isolated within the scene.

Frame 19

Frame 19

Frame 19 was one of the trickier shots to pull off. This involved taking two pictures from the same angle and piecing them together in post production. One shot shows the body of Jake lying on the bed, whilst the other shows Ezraeil and Jake, side by side standing over the body. I applied a colder colour to this to really capture the sadness of the scene and make us feel for Jake. The over-the-shoulder shot, showing that he had to lay eyes upon his own body in a hospital bed.

Frame 20

Frame 20

For the final scene, each side of the frame is filled by Jake and Ezraeil. Jake towers over her and fills the majority of the shot, suggesting that he has 'grown' from his experiences with dealing with his imminent death. Dark shadows contrasting from the lights was achieved through post production and really highlight the emotions that Jake is dealing with, complimented by his expression. Despite this, Ezraeil is warmly smiling, knowing that he's ready and accepting. The light bouncing off of the light wall illuminates her facial expression, suggesting that she has a glowing presence.

Analysis Planning Process and Hypothesis Construction

UNIT F634

Potential Films for analysis:

• The Dark Knight Trilogy
• (500) Days Of Summer – How Narrator is used to explore Tom & Summer’s psyche
• Wish I Was Here
• Star Wars franchise
• The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
• Youth In Revolt
• Garden State
• Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko had the strongest ideas in the way of questions raised by the film that I could analyse, as well as being a film that I have some level of expertise and great enthusiasm for. After much drafting and feedback, I decided upon the following question:-

How do the technical elements within Donnie Darko create a style and atmosphere that disorientates the viewing experience?

I believe that this question allows me to analyse both the visual/audio/narrative elements and apply them to both the psyche of the characters, the director (in a pseudo form of auteurship), and any projection/effect this may have on the viewer. This gave me much to talk about, and; knowing the elements of the film, had many examples and scenes that I could raise in my analysis. Below is the list made as a preliminary plan to my analysis.

Potential points:

• The use of Frank and his costume – also mentioned in the motivational talk scene, unnerving
• The writing on Donnie’s arm
• The glowing eye of Frank – foreshadowing yet confusing at the time. Invisible walls?
• The “life-force” paths created by each person 48:30 – link back to quote from The Destructors passage in classroom scene (also links to flooding of school)
• Music within the film and the lyrics
• Intro song lyrics – Echo and the Bunny men
• “The Artifact and the Living”
• The voice of Frank
• The shot at 16:00 in, obscures himself from School
• Quotes such as “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” can throw the viewer off, but makes them think

These points helped me throughout as I could refer back to them should I need anything more to talk about or as a checklist for what I had written about. These points were done from memory, proving to myself that I knew the film and would be most confident in talking about these rather than researching and finding new arguments to answer my hypothesis question.
Essentially, this document was created to organise my ideas of my film of study for my Hypothesis. Not only did it allow me to note down films that I felt confident in writing about, but also allowed me to create a hypothesis question for my film of study and collect points from that film to answer that question.

Donnie Darko Analysis (First Draft)

How do the technical elements within Donnie Darko create a style and atmosphere that disorientates the viewing experience?

“Sometimes in our confusion, we see not the world as it is, but the world through eyes blurred by the mind.”

         -Anonymous

For my investigation I have chosen to study Donnie Darko (released 2001), by debut director Richard Kelly. The film follows a dark and troubled teen, Donnie Darko as he is haunted by his sleep conditions, causing him to sleepwalk and hallucinate visions of a man in a bunny suit, (Frank) who informs him that the world will end very soon, and instructs Donnie on how he can stop it. He accepts, even if it causes him to sacrifice everything he owns – including his belief in life as we know it.

This idea is also present in one of Kelly’s interviews. He states:

 “I can only hope that when the world comes to an end I'll be able to breath in a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to[1]”

To disorientate is to obscure and warp the perspective of an entity, causing the subject (in this case, the viewer) to become lost and confused. The Oxford Dictionary defines disorientate as:

“Cause (someone) to lose their sense of direction:

“When he emerged into the street, he was totally disorientated”

Make (someone) feel confused:

“Being near him made her feel weak and disorientated[2]””

Within film, disorientation to the audience can be given in many different ways. Some describe disorientation within film to be when screen direction rules are broken or challenged. This can either make the director look incredibly skilled within creating audience confusion and add to the emotion of a scene well, or can be confused for lazy/bad filmmaking rather than experimentation, if done incorrectly.[3] Elements from cinematography such as Dutch angles, long takes and tracking shots which play on Depth of Field - to obscure and create imagery through blocking. The lighting contrasts from the deepest blacks, to the bloom of whites and light colours are also often found, to suggest surrealism. Music and dialogue used atop this effectively convey emotion and atmosphere. Despite the majority of film disorientation and ambiguity being subjective and an act of expression from the director, there are pioneers who laid the foundation of film inflicted-confusion. For example, filmmaker Alain Resnais once said:

“I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life"[4]

Proving that, much like his favourite directors, he wanted to make the surrealism of a scene stand out and easily be noted as such a scene, drawing as vast of an distance between surrealism and reality as he could.

In this context, I will be discussing the confusion that Donnie Darko’s visual and audio elements caused and how it does this.

The disorientation within Donnie Darko makes the viewer feel that they have been abruptly introduced to a surreal world, very different from our own, often causing them to lose the general direction of the plot. This can make the viewing experience go either two ways. The film can either be found to be brilliant and thought-provoking, causing the viewer to feel satisfied upon understanding the film, past the disorientation. Alternatively, the film can become frustrating as it causes the audience to think, or could not make sense to anyone but the director, causing upset.

I believe that Donnie Darko effectively does the former and makes the viewer think and question both the elements inside of the film and elements of life outside of the film.

The disorientation of the viewer can be found in very many scenes through uses of various techniques and stylistic features.

One of the ways that Donnie Darko disorientates the viewer is through the opening scene. The film begins by showing our protagonist Donnie waking up in the middle of a road on a mountain, completely alone. Atmospheric, mellow piano music fills the viewers ears as Donnie smiles toward the camera. The scene continues as Donnie proceeds to ride home in his pyjamas, devoid of dialogue, which is replaced by the ominous music of Echo and The Bunny Men (an allusion to the character of Frank). Each character shown, despite being a member of family, is seen to have Donnie making no attempt to converse with any of them until the following scene, potentially demonstrating Donnie’s isolation from everyone within his family due to personality clashes.

This scene disorientates the viewer as they are left asking why Donnie had awoken in such an odd place with no explanation given until a later scene. This is shown by always framing Donnie in a longshot, showing how small he is within the world, how alone he is within the scene and gives the full view of body language. The director does this to create the atmosphere by questioning the character of why the family had no dialogue to set up relationships within the family and what the plot of the film is going to be. This contrasts from a typical film opening, which would give a hyper-realistic vision of the characters for exposition, usually a ‘nuclear family’ in suburbia (often done through voiceover/dialogue). Instead, this film challenges the narrative construct by making the not at all exploring the family backstory until the following scene, and possibly presenting the idea that the family do experience some problems, shown by parents’ lack of care as to Donnie’s sleepwalking. The camera, throughout the scene, is active, panning to and from Donnie to other characters within his neighbourhood. The motion itself is very physically disorientating as the shift in perspective creates a difference in depth of field, as well separating Donnie from the other people seen within the scene.

Another scene that disorientates the viewer is at 1:26:00 when the countdown displays that only “Six hours remain” – referring back to the character of Frank and his information of when the world will end. The scene begins when Donnie separates from the crowd at the party.

Almost instantly, we are disorientated from the viewing experience as the camera does a full 360° rotation, with Donnie’s head being the centre point of the rotation, so focus is kept on him. This rotation occurs around Donnie’s head (the central point of the shot) potentially suggesting that he is facing some psychological disorientation/conflict, supported by the performance of Jake Gyllenhaal, who scrunches his face and uses the walls for balance as if his character was experiencing some kind of dizziness and unease

Not only does this place us with the psyche of Donnie, but it also throws the viewer off and disorientates us to, as it’s not explained (until scenes after) why this had happened. The act of rotating the camera around like this utilizes a dolly and completely distracts the viewer from the other events in the scene, causing the continuity to become skewed (just like the camera angle).

To make this shot all the more confusing, once the camera reaches the 180° point, the frame rate increases rapidly, making everyone else in the background move very quickly and the camera continues rotating around Donnie until it reaches the full rotation. This change in speed in the middle of the shot may have been used to hurry up the shot; as to keep the viewer engaged and not bore them. However, I believe that the change in speed was done as a stylistic choice and that the length of the shot matters not to Kelly, as the Average Shot Length (ASL) of Donnie Darko is 6.7 seconds, which compared to films like the Requiem for a Dream (ASL=2.7) and The Avengers (ASL=2.8s), proves that Kelly doesn’t mind making the viewer wait long for a shot to end. This is done to create mystery and suspense as the longer a shot goes on for, the more it leads the viewer to believe that something is going to happen. In this instance, it allows the unsettling feeling of being disorientated to settle in.

The scene also depicts the liquid-like spears that come from the chests of everyone, as a pre-planned path, seen before within the film. This was explained to be the ‘soul energy’ of each of living entity on the path of ‘fate’. The reason that this is depicted is to remind the viewer that Donnie can see this path sometimes, and that it was ‘fate’ that certain events happen. For example, when Donnie’s soul energy leads him to the fridge to see a sign that Frank had left, Donnie immediately knows that he has to find Frank. This is obscure as the graphics themselves are very ominous and look ghostly in appearance. For those who did not see the explanation for these spears, this scene would’ve made no sense.

 This scene then takes it a step further as the introduction of other party goers’ spears are introduced as the shot suddenly becomes obscured by these paths. As soon as the first one enters, a flurry of bagpipes play along to the already chilling Joy Division song. This could potentially relate to the confusion that Donnie is experiencing as he can suddenly see these spirit energy beams, proven by the POV shot of one heading straight toward him, triggering a very odd scene.

The scene shows the spirit energy heading directly toward the camera, Donnie’s eye line. As soon as it reaches Donnie, his eyes rapidly swell and shrink (alternatively), in a very surreal manner. The space around Donnie’s head is filled with the rippling effect of the beam and the spectrum of colours that it is reflecting.

This is a very disorientating scene as the close-up is already a confrontational shot, when accompanied by the editing; the shot becomes even more unnerving. This is due to the surrealism of the scene, none of this would occur within our own lives, so the lack of experience for us as the viewer, causes us to wonder what is happening within this scene and even go as far as to question the sanity of the character, linking back to his own referral as being “emotionally troubled”.

The editing techniques used in this scene includes an effect known as “bulge” on both eyes, which fluctuates between huge amounts of bulging and little to none, giving a very disorientating effect as the characters eyes swell and shrink simultaneously, making the face disproportionate and almost alien. It could be argued that the budget constraints set by Kelly’s debut film made the editing all the more disorientating within respects to the scene. I believe that with a larger budget, the film would be a lot less confusing as the effects would be cleaner and executed closer to those conventions of mainstream film. Despite having little spent on it, the editing adds so much more to the scene as it adds it makes everything a little more alien by breaking away from conventional editing styles than it would do with the budget of a blockbuster film.

The scene continues as Donnie is taken through a clouded tunnel, back to reality. All seems normal, except for the audio which appears muffled and echoed as if Donnie’s mind is only focused on one thing (preventing the end of the world), in some state of mental tunnel vision. These effects applied to the audio make it somewhat chilling, as if we’re on the other side of the glass to the characters, separating our reality from theirs all the more. This separation is a representation of the surrealism within the scene, heightened by the performance of the actors/actresses and their panic.

Another disorientating scene in Donnie Darko involves one in which a PTA meeting is held. A noticeable technique used is the constant crosscutting between the on-going narrative events in the film, the blaming of the flooding at the PTA meeting, and Donnie’s psychological conflict with Frank.

The immediate and unmotivated crosscut from the PTA meeting to Donnie is disorientating, as there’s no context as to why Donnie’s narrative side is shown during the scene, we’re just thrown into it and left guessing until Frank the bunny explains the situation through this narrative’s events. During this scene, director Richard Kelly states within the Audio Commentary[5] that “molecules are being manipulated so that this vision, this ‘messenger’ can appear to him, ‘they’ are warning him” – despite this being a very vague description of Kelly’s vision for the scene, this also gives us various clues that spin us deeper into confusion.

The talk of particle manipulation leads us to think of some kind of superpower and/or paranormal being taunting Donnie with its presence and disturbing the room and creating a “water barrier” between itself and Donnie.  And manipulating particles further by creating a vision of a messenger (Frank) to appear to him and warn him of the danger. This can allude to some religious symbolism of an Angel; often described to be a ‘messenger’, came to Donnie in a vision (hence the water barrier to represent the fact that Frank is intangible) to warn him of the danger ahead of time, much like ‘Guardian Angels’ do. This can contrast entirely from the Science Fiction genre this film is placed in, and subverts the rules of the genre (in this instance) to disorientate the viewer.

When discussing the topic of Disorientation in film, we can see many similar elements within the same style of film, that due to other directors adopting these very elements have become somewhat conventional within disorientating films. A pioneer within film disorientation is Alain Resnais, who had worked 6 decades in the film industry and is known for his surreal film style. The most disorientating of these films is “Toute la mémoire du monde” (1956), which; translated, means: “All the World’s Memory” – We can draw many similarities between the visual style of Resnais’ film and Donnie Darko, for example, low level lighting (shown in the screenshots below) are used to obscure and confuse the viewer as shapes can transform and appear differently under low light, leaving the brain to disorientate itself as it tries to make sense of the shapes with the limited light that enters the eye.

Resnais; despite separating himself from any movement, is said to be a key role in the 'French New Wave' era of filmmaking. Films produced within this movement are known for their "radical experiments with editing, visual style and narrative"[6] - which could also be said for Richard Kelly's style of filmmaking within Donnie Darko. The ideas of time travel and parallel universes, displayed with surreal editing  of dream-like sequences and consistent deep, high contrasting chiaroscuro set upon closeups (example pictured below), complimented blue tones to set the mood, all could mean that Kelly was; consciously or not, inspired by and included the themes and trends that a French New Wave film had within them conventionally.

The use of technical elements to create a surrealist piece could be said to be a direct subversion of the Apparatus theory's rules. Apparatus theory is often described as the following:

"It maintains that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological and because the films are created to represent reality"[7]

We can see that Donnie Darko is far from being a realist film and therefore breaks the rules of an Apparatus theory-built film, despite adopting the same method of using film to convey emotion (in Kelly's case, disorientation) onto the audience, created through use of camera and editing; the same way that realist Apparatus theory films are made, Kelly sets out to obscure and move his film further and further away from reality, making it a perfect example of Disorientation in film created through technical elements.

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[1] IMDb,. "Donnie Darko (Character)". N.p., 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015. (http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0002798/quotes)

[2] Oxforddictionaries.com,. "Disorientate - Definition Of Disorientate In English From The Oxford Dictionary". N.p., 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2015. (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/disorientate)

[3] Wikipedia, 'Screen Direction'. N.p, 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_direction#Avant-garde)

[4] Wikipedia, 'Alain Resnais'. N.p, 2015. Web. 28 Sept. 2015. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Resnais)

[5] Found at:  https://youtu.be/PeOq3Nx-DDg?t=2235 - Accessed 8 Feb 2016

[6] "French New Wave". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave)

[7] "Apparatus Theory". Wikipedia. N.p., 2016. Web. 21 Mar. 2016. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatus_theory)