Picking The Right Setting (for the film)
After a lot of time and debating where to have the film set, I had to work around way more than I initially thought. My first setting was to be in an apartment building due to the personal feeling of having the reality of one's safest place, their home that they believe to know so well, shift and change around them. That and the idea of having an are with an elevator and staircase that I could film around made the setting that much more feasible.
Needless to say, from that Idea stemmed other possible settings. Mainly due to COVID-19 kicking a lot of students out of the apartment I knew I could film at, and the fact that doing so meant I needed to change settings. One such setting that I could only dream to have the budget to make reality was an office building. Imagining the setting of a man's mundane life overturned the second he enters the wrong floor. He gets off the elevator to the same floor he was already on but with every cubicle empty. That emptiness continues but not for long as noises just outside his vision, or around a corner make him feel even more uneasy as he tries to get a grip on his surroundings. Making the once well known office he had been going to day in, day out, for years, is now foreign ground to him. Distorting more and more, maybe having at first drops of blood on a desk on one floor, to the entire office space covered in viscera on another. I’d end a film like that similarly to the 1978 “invasion of the body snatchers”, where the main character thinks everything is normal until one of the coworkers makes some inhuman sound and every coworker attacks the main character with a slow pan to the elevator closing behind him.
I settled with the current scene being an elevator, the area around it, a staircase, and a hallway because of budget purposes. Honestly with those settings alone, I was able to come up with something that I could make more cinematic as I went along, as to something with way more production, and too much detail. The less is more side of me came out roaring at this idea, and I believe that I can see it through better than the office. I don’t have to rely on the ending being a large crowd of people attacking the main character. As much as I want that to be the final result, 3 or 4 people doing so will suffice just as well.
In the end, I chose the option to have dialogue out of the film so that I can build on the tension of silence. Having one character interacting with only himself and speaking is too much. It would end up being their blaring exposition at the audience, and that doesn’t make for a good film. It plays upon the comfort of everyday life and how it could easily be changed in a matter of moments (not that anything in the film could actually ever take place.)
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