I wanted to create a piece portraying my experience with self-isolation. I have been self-isolating for two weeks and have been going through a series of emotions, spiralling thoughts and had different encounters with people as I usually would have. I want to make a piece exploring some of the feelings, thoughts and interactions or lack of interactions with other people I have had over the past couple of days to gain a better understanding of the whole situation of which I have found myself.
I will start by collecting my thoughts through a brainstorming mindmap to be able to analyse and collect the most important points of my experiences with self-isolation.
I then highlighted the things that repeated itself throughout the mindmap and the feelings that had been more predominant than others. This was especially the feelings of loneliness, sadness, feeling trapped and a lack of connection and I want to apply these to the final piece.
I wanted to find a cinematographic efficient way to portray loneliness so I sought to movies looking up loneliness and isolation as a theme in movies. I found Lost in Translation, watched it and identified so strongly with Charlotte, the female lead. A recent graduate who traveled to Tokyo with her detached husband hoping to find something. The husband is never around so she is left to herself. She now finds herself in a different country, feeling trapped in a luxurious hotel room, alone and feels alienated from her surroundings, unable to properly communicate with anyone outside the hotel. I have found myself trapped in my hall room, sharing a flat with someone I have never met, communicating through handwritten notes or group messages on a mobile app. Even though I live with these people, I cannot properly communicate with them I I would normally, I’m not allowed in the kitchen or public areas when other people are around. Having the maintenance guy knock on my door but refusing to touch anything inside my room made me feel alienated, foreign, like I was seriously dirty and hadn’t washed in months. I feel trapped, alone, wanting and seeking a connection like Charlotte in Lost in Translation.
What particularly struck me about cinematic choices made in the film was the minimalistic approach to cinematography, muted colors and the subtle it, his choice to use as little artificial lighting as possible giving the entire film a quietly naturalistic feeling. The cinematographic element of placing a character inside a frame to emphasize a feeling of loneliness, alienates the character to the rest of the story within the bigger frame. This is why I am also going to place my character within a frame, also to emphasize the urge to go outside by looking outside a window. The character is also often shown in the mirror or window as a reflection of themselves, which I want to apply as well enhancing the feeling of them being alone.
I also wanted to gain a better understanding of how loneliness and sadness had been portrayed previously in art, so I looked toward the Danish female painter Anna Ancher. What I found incredibly interesting with Anna Ancher, not only is she one of the only female painters from her time where an art education was not allowed for women, but she sought ways to capture immediate and fleeting impressions in her painting by light. Lighting being the actual motif for the painting, she often had still composition with only one character to predict their inner life. Their inner life is told through the lighting, colours and their surroundings in the room. Anna Ancher mostly depicted women portraying their role they had in a family of being a woman waiting for her man to come home but not required outside of the house as the man. The women in question are never looking at the audience but always looking down, showing and depicting an introverted side to them. Back then it was not looked well upon if women would be present in the public without a male companion. What is also super interesting is that being a part of the movement Skagensmalerne, Anna was one of the only painters depicting, showing and painting her characters inside whereas men of the movement mostly painted their characters outside again underlining the gender roles of society around 1900. What I take with me by studying her paintings are the depiction of the characters inside being trapped and how light can show the inner state of the person in the painting.
https://www.smk.dk/en/article/themes-in-anna-anchers-art/
https://www.wikiart.org/en/anna-ancher
First I drew my room below to take inspiration from that in creating thumbnails. Applying the idea of a frame within a frame, the importance of light and the loneliness aspect, I created thumbnails from various compositions to see which worked the best.
First I drew my room below to take inspiration from that in creating thumbnails. Applying the idea of a frame within a frame, the importance of light and the loneliness aspect, I created thumbnails from various compositions to see which worked the best.
Whereas Lost In Translation uses the bare minimun of colours, I wanted to put emphasis on the light as in Anna Ancher’s paintings. This is why I made a mood board to gain a better understanding of the colours I’m interested and both inspired my the colour choices from Lost in Translation and my mood board, I’m choosing colours from these. The mood board overall consists of very cold colours with warm colours from where the light sources are placed. The cold colours gives the sense of loneliness. I want to apply the limited source of light as candlelight.
I knew that I did not have much experience with candlelight, I sought to James Gurney’s book “Color and Light” and read about how the warm light can be enhanced by having muted backgrounds and colours.
Having picked 3 thumbnails of the sheet above, I picked the colours from the moodboard and applied these to the thumbnails to both gain a better understanding of which composition worked the best but also which type of lighting. Applying the same colours to every composition, I found out a nighttime scene would work the best with the first composition, which I then continued working on.
I furthermore, with the composition chosen, add elements of an urge to go outside but being forced to stay in. I added a longboard, which I was dying to use, and used cider bottles. I also came up with the idea of making the piece into a GIF in the forms of a cinemagraph, meaning that I keep elements in the GIF still whereas other elements move and repeats itself over and over again. This will add the feeling of a moment happening over and over again and the stillness will represent the feeling of being trapped and frozen in place.
Now applying the elements of a reflection like Lost in Translation and having the light as in Anna Ancher play the essential role of light showing the inner world of the person in focus, I add further elements of showing loneliness and sadness.
Below is the final piece. It is originally a GIF but as the file is too large, I had to import it to Vimeo as a non-GIF to be able to paste it. In the video sequence below it does repeat itself 3 times though a a GIF.