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Writer's pictureDaniel Bingham

Critical Reflection

Updated: Jan 24, 2020

In 2018, as part of the Film Genre module of my 2nd year of BA Film, we made a short film called Parasite. This is a reflection on the entire process involved in making the film.

On the 18th October we had had group meetings with Catriona to discuss the screenplays selected to be made. I write and direct my own films, but this was not an option so I put myself forwards solely as a director. I knew that being one of the few selected to direct would be coveted position as a lot of people wanted to direct, so to increase my chances of being picked, I stated that I would rather have the role of director than work on a specific film. With hindsight, I can see that perhaps this was a mistake, but it seemed logical to me, at the time at least.

Parasite, or Hole in the Wall as it was then titled was not one of my choices, but I remember thinking and saying at the time that it had an interesting basic concept. The films I wanted to make were Smarties or Mark at the Supermarket, but these were very popular choices. I have a background in making darkly comical films, so I wanted to continue practising this by making a comedy, however I was picked to direct the horror, Hole in the Wall. While surprised and daunted by this choice, I was very excited by the prospect of working in a genre in which I had absolutely no experience.

While I wasn’t necessarily a big fan of James’ screenplay that was presented to me, I realised that it was only a rushed first draft, so I was happy to work on the project as it continued to develop.

The team I was assigned to work with was interesting. Harris Palmer was the producer. Harris and I had actually co-directed a film together in the past and we had written quite a lot together too, so I was very happy for the chance to work with him on another project because we were already very close friends and workmates. Alix Morrison was selected as the director of photography. I didn’t know Alix very well before the film; in fact I had never even spoken to her before because she was new from the start of the academic year. She also seemed surprised to be on the project because it wasn’t one of her choices, but I was happy to work with her because she seemed very down to earth. Kaitlyn Roper was the production designer and I was happy to work with her because it was a role she was very interested in and I could be confident in her. Cameron Cobb was assigned as the editor because he unfortunately couldn’t make the meeting with Catriona so hadn’t been able to give his preferred film or role, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. Finally, MK was our sound designer. I had worked with MK in the past on another film and she had done a pretty good job with the sound, so I was happy with her selection.

I organised for a meeting with James, the writer, and Harris, the producer, soon after we were assigned our roles and films. On the 21st October we met and had a discussion about the screenplay. I gave James my comments and my view for the possible direction of the project. We all agreed that we thought a slow paced horror, perhaps something akin to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, might be the best direction to head in. Harris and I knew that James was still in the very early stages of the screenplay, so we thought it best to give him more general comments at this first meeting. The first main point I raised was that the film was very dialogue heavy. There was a lot of expansionary dialogue and a lot that didn’t really seem to add anything to the film. James and I agreed that this should be reduced to the bare minimum. Another big issue I had with the screenplay was the seemingly unnecessary use of sexual scenes. I felt that these scenes were inappropriate on a moral level, but also entirely counterintuitive for the development of the film. I felt they were a bit crass and actually came across as a bit unintentionally comical. These were all points that James agreed with. We agreed to meet again mid-week but James never replied to our messages about this, so we were unable to organise anything. James had committed to have a second draft of the screenplay finished for the 26th, but unfortunately he didn’t follow through with this.

On the 24th October we planned to have our first full group meeting. However, James, Cameron and MK did not attend this. At this meeting Kaitlyn was able to offer her own flat as a potential location and, after seeing some photos, I thought it looked good. I was able to give Kaitlyn and Alix some of my ideas for the film and communicate the tone I had in mind.

Since the second draft had been due on the morning of the 26th, yet nether Harris or myself had received anything, I messaged James in the afternoon asking about the screenplay’s progress. However, he again didn’t reply. Since we were using Facebook to communicate, we could see he had been able to access our messages but had simply been ignoring us all week. We didn’t know what to do as we were entirely unable to contact him and he hadn’t been to class.

On the 27th, we had still heard nothing from James and we were getting worried. We couldn’t move on with the film until we had a screenplay we could work with. However, that night while out on a walk with a friend, Arthur Johnson, I bumped into James as he was heading out to a fancy dress party. I found it funny that after spending all this time worrying about not having any contact with James, he lived about five minutes away. He claimed he had lots of work on the screenplay done and told me he hadn’t been avoiding me. He told me he wanted to meet with me in the morning to talk about what he had done. I was very relieved to finally get in touch with him.

However, in the morning (28th October) there was no sign of James. He told me he had agreed to go into work all day. I asked him to send me the work he had done on the script, but he ignored this. We rearranged to meet in the evening. When evening came, he told me that he had decided to go home and still couldn’t meet. Late that night he sent me the “second draft” of the script. He had changed the name to ‘Creak’. He had changed very little and the sexual content he had agreed to remove were still there. The script was only two and a half pages long. I had to make do with a phone call. James again agreed to remove the sexual content. James rushed the phone call and quickly hung up.

Again, we lost all contact with James. Harris, the producer, was very worried and frustrated at how James had been handling the situation. James was picked to direct one of the other films and it seemed to us he was focusing on it and not putting the effort into the script. Harris emailed Catriona trying to explain how we felt.

On the 31st October James kicked off. Over Facebook, he swore at Harris for emailing Catriona and hurled abuse at us. He accused me of harassing him. He said I had stalked him to his house and had waited outside with Arthur so that we could gang up on him when he was drunk. I was in shock. I literally couldn’t believe the things I was being accused of because they came so totally out of nowhere. James told these things to our other classmates. People didn’t seem to believe him because it was a ridiculous accusation, but my reputation has still not completely recovered from his slander.

The next day we had a tutorial with Catriona. James handed us a third draft of the screenplay at the door. We didn’t even have time to read it once before our meeting. Harris and I felt very uncomfortable telling Catriona the full extent of what had been going on. We wanted to try to work things out by ourselves. He acted like a totally different person in front of Catriona, so I’m not sure she realised how James had actually been with us. I was still very unhappy with the script and he had still not completely removed the sexual aspect of the script. In fact he told us he refused to.

I was very affected by what had happened with James and no longer felt able to try and work with him on the script. This meeting was the last time we communicated about it. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to go forwards with a screenplay I had no faith in; one which I didn’t like and which was far too short to fill the required runtime. With hindsight, I should have ignored the lies James was spreading about me and pushed until we had a screenplay I could happily work with. However, for the sake of my own mental wellbeing, I had to let it go and go forwards with a screenplay I didn’t like and make a film written by someone I had received nothing but abuse from.

On the 2nd of November, I began to do a first draft of the storyboards with Alix, the DoP. When I direct, I like to storyboard as much as possible. This means that on set, I can improvise and get different shots if I like, but I always have a very firm plan in place with as much of the necessary thinking behind the shots as possible already done. In theory, I should be able to focus more on directing the actors. Alix was very easy to work with in this stage and we were able to very efficiently plan out the visual aspect of the shoot. I had constructed a very extensive mood board, to which Alix also contributed. This was very helpful in informing the style of the film as I was able to draw on a wide variety of different sources for inspiration, notably The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby.

Storyboarding for Parasite was particularly difficult because the screenplay was very unstructured and very short. It had several scenes that were one after the other and only had one or two lines of dialogue with nothing else happening. This wouldn’t flow at all so I had to group a lot of the dialogue together, so extending one scene instead of having several very short scenes. Unfortunately, despite this, there still wasn’t very much to work with and we would not meet the required run time. I found this a challenge because I had to add scenes to the film without making them major enough to cause James to kick off again. I added the slow opening establishing the flat and tried to expand a throwaway one line scene in Emily’s bedroom to a view of her personal possessions from the intruder’s perspective. On the 7th November, Alix and I redrafted the storyboards to accommodate the changes I had to make. An example page can be seen at the end.

Harris and I put out casting calls for the roles of Emily and Laura and on the 3rd November we held auditions. We saw quite a few people, but in the end we chose to cast Mollie Reading as Emily and Natalie Mae Kelly as Laura. We liked Mollie because she seemed quite bubbly and a bit more nervous in the audition, so we thought that this suited the role of Emily best. Natalie came across as much more confident and laid back, which we thought suited Laura. On top of this, they actually knew each other, so it would be easier to make them seem like friends on screen.

On the 8th November, we had a director’s workshop with Catriona. We were meant to be going through our script with a few actors. However, the two actors I was asked to work with were very unfortunate choices! One was Natalie and the other was an actress who had auditioned but not gotten the role. I was very embarrassed for the second actress as it must have been humiliating to have to read the lines of a role she had not be selected for. I apologised to her at the end, but I still felt bad for her.

By this point in the film’s development, to be completely honest, I was feeling very low. I was very unhappy with what I had been put through and how it had been handled. I was very close to quitting the course and pursuing film independently, however the only reason I didn’t was because I realised that if I left, my entire crew would be affected. On the 12th November I had a meeting with Paul Gray. I gave a few issues I had with the course, however, I still felt too uncomfortable to discuss James’ behaviour while the film was still being made.

I had done as much cinematography planning with Alix as I could in the very short timeframe given to us. The film was going to be slow and dark. The shots would reflect this. I wanted the lighting to make use of practicals and include lots of shadows, something I was able to demonstrate on the mood board. I tend to like shooting quite wide angled and since the film, or my interpretation of it at least, was from the perspective of the intruder I thought this same style would be very appropriate.

I had lots of ideas for the production design, but unfortunately they didn’t all end up in the final film. One idea I really liked was for Kaitlyn to try and work eyes into the set as much as possible. Since a main theme of the film was watching people without consent, I found it sickly ironic that the characters were constantly surrounded by eyes. However this unfortunately wasn’t something she ended up doing. The main aspect of Kaitlyn’s job was the construction of a small section of fake wall, so that we could have a hole in it. However there were smaller things, for example, I wanted the sock to be very distinctive so that it was recognisable again at the end.

I very much planned for the edit when shooting. I wanted to use very long, slow shots for the most part, and then whenever the intensity picked up change, to much faster paced shots.

The sound design was always a key aspect of the film. I initially toyed around with the idea of using a score. I considered that a harmonica might be interesting because it is so untypical of this sort of film, yet it is very breathy and could be unsettling in this context. However, I soon decided that sticking to the purely diegetic would be more suitable. At times I still wanted sound to feel very unnatural and exaggerated. This would be shown particularly in the scene in which the character Emily is shaving. I wanted the razor going along her skin to sound like sandpaper and grow in intensity.

Unfortunately the trials and tests we had planned were not able to go ahead. Alix booked out the equipment, but unfortunately for some reason Ben never received the booking.

On the 13th November we shot the film. We had been told that we were only allowed one day to shoot, so we were very rushed. Unfortunately, because Alix had not been able to have much practice with the equipment, we had been unaware that our monitor would not work at the same time as the LED screen on the back of the camera. This meant that I would not be able to watch the screen as we were shooting. I watched it as much as possible, but I was never able to see it directly. I just had to concentrate on the actors themselves and wasn’t able to direct Alix as much as I would have liked. It seems that she maybe wasn’t as experienced as I thought she was. Unfortunately lots of the footage was out of focus, shaky and the white balance wasn’t set properly. The lighting also hadn’t reflected what we had planned. I really messed up. I shouldn’t have given Alix so much responsibility because she couldn’t handle it and was unable to produce what we had planned.

I reviewed the footage that night with Harris and knew straight away that we would need a reshoot; not a very nice feeling after the amount of work that goes into something like this. I had arranged with Cameron for him to pick up the footage, but unfortunately had to cancel several times until he eventually took it on the 20th November.

We weren’t able to get our actors back for the reshoot for a variety of reasons. We would try to reshoot as much as possible without the actors. Another issue was that we wouldn’t be able to get access to the Canon 50D with which we had originally shot and had to use a Canon 1200D instead.

On 21st November we had a test shoot. This time I realised that I was going to have to pay a lot closer attention to Alix’s cinematography. I showed her various lighting setups in order to show her how we might achieve the certain looks we had discussed before. In the end, she decided that she would rather I operated the camera and let her focus on the lights. I was happy to do this, because it meant I was able to see the shot much clearer and could direct the shot a lot easier.

We reshot as much as we could on the 22nd November and we were much happier with the results from this. Harris was unable to attend for most of the reshoot, but we were able to work away anyway. I made extensive notes for post production on how I wanted them to handle the things I provided them.

Cameron, the editor, was also quite difficult to contact because I think he was very busy, but on the 28th November he finally started to edit, however he didn’t transcode the footage properly and on 8th December he restarted it. Cameron didn’t quite understand the slow pacing, so it took a while to explain how slowly I wanted things to play out. When he had grasped this he was able to work much more smoothly. We were very rushed at this point because Cameron had continuously delayed starting, but by the 11th November we had picture lock.

On the 12th December, MK began the sound edit. I don’t think she was as experienced as she thought and she struggled to understand certain things I was asking her to do, such as muffling audio. It was at this point MK discovered she hadn’t recorded as much sound as she thought she had and hadn’t made the bank of sounds we had agreed upon. The sound edit continued over the next few days. I came in at the start and end of each day in order to check MK’s progress and give her further direction. She struggled to find or record sounds required, so I had to give her help to find these specific sounds, but we got there in the end. MK took a break for a few days and on the 19th, we had to finish it off. It wasn’t quite what I had planned and directed towards, but then it never works out exactly.

As MK was editing sound, I was colour grading the footage and changing to the correct aspect ratio. Cameron was meant to be doing this, but unfortunately I struggled to contact him again so ended up doing it myself. I really struggled to grade the footage, because it was difficult to match the original footage and the reshot footage. Unfortunately due to the way the original footage was shot it was difficult to grade them with character and they just ended up very washed out.

The final film is not one I like. The entire process was difficult and now represents to me one of the lowest points in my life. They things that were said to me and about me just weren’t true and had a very negative impact on me. With regard to the film, I didn’t have the creative control I should have had as a director. Harris struggled to give me this control because it was not a real world situation. In the real world, certain people would never have gotten away with behaving the way they did, but we were really restricted by the course. I did however learn a lot from working with someone as difficult as James.

A big issue with the film was that the crew that was selected unfortunately didn’t all choose to work on the film. Unfortunately, James’ script wasn’t very popular and people who couldn’t be fitted into other films were slotted into it. This resulted in a crew who didn’t all actually want to be working on the film and I struggled to try and motivate them.

The film also very definitely exposed a lot of my flaws as a director. It was a genre I had never worked in before so I was very inexperienced when it came to a film of that style. I enjoyed working with most of the crew and the cast, but at this stage I shouldn’t assume they are entirely comfortable in their fields. As a filmmaker I struggle to separate the roles of writing, directing and editing. They aren’t mutually exclusive to me. I’m constantly making decisions about each area at all stages of the film. However when I’m trying to work with a writer, particularly one I have no contact with so can’t collaborate with, I have a very firm idea of the film.

At the crit for the film, it was better received than I expected. It was very clearly not on the same level as the other films unfortunately, but people seemed to enjoy it well enough.

People seemed to like a lot of my framing, however Andrew noted that the lighting needed more contrast and commented that the highlights clipped at times. I think these criticisms are entirely fair. These are things that I had noticed after the shoot and unfortunately could not be reshot because we couldn’t get our actors back.

I was really worried about what people would think of the things I had to add due to the short screenplay. Leon really didn’t like the long, slow opening establishing the environment, however Olivia did. She said she liked this as it immediately set an eerie tone. I found this very interesting, as it seemed to work for some people but not others.

Olivia also said she enjoyed my shot choice, however she criticised that the narrative was unclear. This again, I think was fair. Since the screenplay didn’t really have a narrative, struggled to create one in my directing. I put a lot more emphasis on the sock and shot the film mostly from the perspective of the intruder in order to show how the intensity of living in the flat is increasing and becoming more and more uncomfortable.

Zoe noted that the film needed a lot more attention to sound design. Unfortunately MK was pushed for time due to the delayed edit and took a few days off herself, so really wasn’t able to do much more. I very definitely agree with Zoe though. I think a lot more could have been done with the sound; for example, one of the things I asked MK to do was to use the same sound on the macaroni for the shots of the maggots.

The maggots however seemed to be an issue for some people. They were intended as something more abstract, but some people interpreted them literally and got confused. They were simply there to represent the sick and uncomfortable feeling the characters were experiencing.

Another thing Zoe criticised was how ambiguous the man in the wall was. She and a few class members didn’t pick up that there was a man in the walls and thought it was some kind of creature. However, I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. The point of the film was the paranoia and being uncomfortable in your own home, so it being a man or a creature was irrelevant. I kept this intentionally ambiguous, because to me it just didn’t matter.

In the end, I agree with a lot of the comments made during the crit and will take it all on board for the future. Despite my experience being painful and the film not being what it could have been, I have learned a lot from making it; for example I learned from my experience working with uncooperative people and I learned that in future I should ensure people know exactly what is expected of them and that they can actually do it. All of this learning and experience, both good and bad, will help me to improve and hone my skills and techniques, and make me a more confident and accomplished filmmaker.

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