Stigmata

This project was originally my tutors idea and after talking to him about it we decided to collaborate on it. The original idea was to have a group of people around a table and a camera continuously filming. As the camera goes round once, an effects artist goes in and makes marks  on the actors faces. The whole thing is done live. This was influenced by The Perfect Human:

This project then developed into two people, a couple who would be seated a meter away from each other and be staring at each other with no expression what so ever, but the effects artist working  on the live in shot would be show the emotional abuse going on between them. The violence they inflict on each other would show up as bruises on their face and torso.  This idea used less people and the message was less subtle. I started a story board for it:

The idea I had here was to make the actor preform really slowly, if they were to move in the shot at all. so the effects artist can come in and create their art. I made a test for this:

The Feedback from this test was that the FX artists would be in shot and would therefore be under pressure to finish a wound on time. This may effect how believable of the wound is. I did not want to carry this risk so I decided to have a rethink about the whole story. By this time I knew it would be difficult to work with two actors in this story, if it would have to be re thought. So I cut it to one actor and decided the conflict would be self inflicted. Here is the first story board i came up with:

I really felt like I was on to something with this new story but it was a bit borderline. I definitely knew that I wanted to play with the MILO camera rig for this project and create a singe world through a mirror for this young lady who is trapped in an abusive relationship and looking for a way out. I was told to mix the story up a bit more and really put in some physically horrible deformations as the video played on. I wrote these down as a bullet points and then made a story board out of them:

By this time I had found an actress for my effects artist. I had gone through the makeup routine with  my actress who is a burlesque dancer and had a scar  painted across my cheek to see how the effects artist works:

Now that I had a good idea how the effects art was done I could go about perfecting my story and then planning the shots in the three days I had to film. I asked a friend to be the actress so I could take actual shots of the story board and put them together  in the way i see the final film:

This gave me a good idea of the bits I wanted to change. It was not big changes, but subtle ones to make the final film look better. first of all, the camera would not need to pan  180 around the table because she will well in shot with a smaller pan. Secondly, the prop table needed to have the bottom drawer removed so she could sit in front of it comfortably. Also I realized that after i had all the footage i would be able to pick and drop the best footage to  create the best edit for the film. It may not resemble the original story board. But to have this opportunity i would first need to go through the story board and create a shot list so i knew what to film.

through out this process i had kept my actress and FX artist informed about what was going on, so on the day of the shoot i had a good connection with them. I was able to tap into different emotions with my actress and make her cry and smile  when  it was time to film a particular shot. I made a quick test edit from the first day:

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I sent this to my piers and it received some positive and constructive crit. I knew that i was  on the right track. Using a piece of unidentifiable music I edited the rest of the video and i am very happy with the out come. it means different things to different people who watch it but definitely connects with them. The thought of no background, the only item in the scene  is the table draws alot of attention to it and i think that creates a dream like state in the viewer and then thy openly accept the weird and frightening things that happen to the actress as her own thoughts and imagination playing tricks on her or memories from the past coming to haunt her. Here is my final piece: