Creative Journey

ESSENCE

Creative Journey

My initial idea for ‘Essence’ came after reading the quotation, ‘existence precedes essence’, by Jean-Paul Sartre, and seeing Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic, ‘Blade Runner’. I watched it in preparation for 2017’s ‘Blade Runner 2049’, and was inspired very heavily by it’s themes and universe - this was in September 2017.

When I realised after watching that I wanted to do a dark sci-fi in the spirit of Blade Runner, I quickly took to my laptop to write down as many notes and ideas as I could. Eventually I landed on the idea of Essence, involving human clones (in the place of Blade Runner’s ‘replicant’ characters), and setting it mostly in the confines of a house; this was due to having limited resources at my disposal. I wanted to make it as small-scale as possible without making it dull or boring. Because of my decision of the house setting, I initially thought of Essence as a sci-fi / horror film - it could be tense and dark, as the clone protagonist attempts to escape his life of servitude, and his abusive master. However, I decided to drop the horror aspects of the film in the screenwriting stage as these parts of the film took too much away from the plot, and didn’t quite work within the overall product.

So instead, I decided to bring the science fiction back to the forefront, and focus on making Essence as dramatic and emotional as possible. This lead to me developing the characters more, and fleshing out their motivations and reasons for doing what they do in the short film. For example, ‘Ben #38’ (the protagonist) is quite complacent at the beginning of Essence, and is fully accepting of his role as a clone. It is only until his best friend (another clone) is needlessly killed that the character begins going through a change, and decides that he will forge his own destiny. At this point, I was able to give Ben #38 a beginning, a middle, and an end; and goal to strive towards to show the progression of his character.

From the outset, even before the screenwriting stage, I decided that I would not go for the typical ‘Hollywood ending’ in my short film. I knew that I didn’t want Ben #38’s plan to be successful and that he would be ‘decommissioned’ by the end of Essence. I wanted to do this to fully cement to the audience what the world of my short film is truly like, and that what happens to Ben #38 is what happens to countless other clones everyday in this universe.

When I was done with the screenwriting, I produced the storyboards for Essence; where I decided how the short film would be visualised. I decided I would use a lot of tight and close-up shots to create a claustrophobic, almost suffocating feeling for the majority of Essence. Despite this, I still wanted to make room for more grandiose shots that were a bit more kinetic; so I applied a few of these more impressive shots when necessary to make the cinematography more varied.

The shooting for Essence lasted the span of nearly two months but was really only the work of around five days in total. As previously mentioned, most of the shoot was set in the house, but for some scenes it was necessary to be outdoors. This was the most challenging part of the overall shoot, as you have to try and film around the public and the noise of the outdoors. Filming indoors posed a different problem. Most of the time the lighting was artificial, and so it was nearly impossible to make it suit the scene the way I wanted it to - this had to be rectified in post-production.

Once filming was complete, it was straight to editing, which I left until the end instead of editing bit-by-bit as I filmed. Using Adobe After Effects CS6, I edited each scene in a separate tab to make it a little bit easier for me as an editor. Having each single element in one tab - of what resulted in a nearly seven minute short film - would have been far too overwhelming. The visual editing process took about a week to complete, taking me from late December to early January (this was the result of re-shoots I had to complete after I thought my initial filming was complete). In the editing, I tried to remain conscious of the pace of Essence, as well as continuity. Moreover, it allowed for me to apply colour-correction (affecting the hue, brightness, and saturation of each frame), and effects like the zoom and depth-of-field; all only when necessary to the shot, when it had a purpose. It was also here where I edited certain aspects of both diegetic and non-diegetic sound, including voice-over. Finally, I added credits to Essence.

After the lengthy editing process, I composed and performed the music for Essence myself. I decided to go for a simple piano score, as the instrument is versatile and suits many types of genre of film. However I still wanted it to feel like a classic film score, so I have various motifs that run through the film, such as the villain’s theme (belonging to ‘Original Ben’).

Once the score was applied, I then decided to add the song ‘Dear God’, performed by Lawless to the end credits of Essence, as I thought contents of the song could almost be from Ben #38’s point of view, and so it fit my short film perfectly. After doing so, I constructed an email to Virgin Records requesting permission to use the song. At this point, the short film was all complete; what remained now were the remaining print products, such as the poster and a magazine review in the style of Empire magazine. I wanted to keep the poster design quite minimalistic, and nothing too over-the-top, as this wouldn’t be representative of the slower pace of Essence. I took inspiration from posters for films such as Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’, and Doug Jones’ ‘Moon’.