Ghost in the Machine

(Summary at bottom)

'Ghost in the Machine' was the first proper production I made within University. For this we were assigned to create a 5 minute short film in pre-allocated groups, where we were tasked to take an original concept across all stages of production as a collective. Coming from my experiences within College, the vast shift in the equipment and crew we had readily accessible to us was intense, but exciting. I signed up to be the director for the project and managed to get chosen for it. In the past, all my projects had included me controlling every aspect of production and taking on practically every role outside of being a member of the cast, so to now be in charge of a crew of creatives (all with an active desire to be involved and not just peers I managed to get to sign on) was another drastic shift to adjust to. 

When coming up with the idea, I immediately aimed to put in the idea of taking a really simple concept, and then stretching it out in order to hit the 5 minute limit, rather than attempting to compress a longer idea into 5 minutes. This was something I aimed to input given my experience of 'Decisions', yet ultimately I feel the idea still ended up falling into the latter. When creating the script, I collaborated with the writer and gave my own small inputs but ultimately let her do her thing, along with the rest of the crew as I wanted to be a director who gave his crew trust and room to breathe. After a few drafts we came to a satisfactory script and the pre-production seemed to be moving smoothly. However, despite the fact that we conceptually planned to make sure it was a short enough film, the script did not translate as such and we heavily underestimated our timings- although this wasn't particularly realised until the edit. This wasn't fault of the writer or anyone in particular, it ultimately came down still to our experience of how scripts translate into timings, and a need to give these things practical testing before execution. Through the rest of the pre-production I collaborated with the crew where we gave different ideas and things we wished to execute. A big desire of mine was to have these sections of very handheld naturalistic realism for the majority of the film, and then for the moments our main character talks to the AI replication of his sister, the film becomes far more stylistic to reflect the romanticisation of his delusional relationship with this AI. The two biggest moments I wished to emphasise this through was during the opening scene that I wanted to be a one-take from the reflection of a mirror, and a moment where the camera transitioned behind the computer, going from the realism to the romanticised reality. These did get realised within the final product, although the opening shot did get cut for time as the original shot was almost a minute long.