Genre.
Psychedelic, Experimental, Film Noir

Logline.
A man’s hedonistic attempts to liven up his dreary life by misuse of psychedelic narcotics.

Synopsis.
Colour Me Psycho follows a man on his journey of addiction, a desperate attempt to liven up his repetitive life. Luca is a financial advisor who had big plans to go to Europe to become a nature photographer. In the movie his roommate Elijah explains that he imagined Luca would “have a documentary of his own by the time he was 25, pulling him across Europe. Now I just don’t want him to die.” Luca’s office is mundane and empty. His escape is creating drunken mayhem on the streets and in the city’s thriving nightclubs. But how long can a man run before reality catches up?

Director’s Vision.
I have a fascination with the content and style of both the psychedelic and film-noir eras, eg. Casablanca, 1942) and Daisies (1966) and lastly the experimentation of structural film (for example At Land, 1944). I want to study and combine these cinematic styles to create an unnerving narrative work that is filmed in a modern age and city. I want to make this film because I grew up on old cinema with my parents and as computer generated imagery advances further, stark black and white film is being lost to the ages. These films are a delightful and captivating part of cinematic history. Recording the unrest and tense emotions of the early 1900s mixed with the escape of the 1960s/70s, there is a resemblance to those times in the societal emotion of today. With turmoil from both natural disaster and pandemic across the globe, and close to home in New Zealand, we
have varying amounts of anxiety, caution, impatience and unrest when going through everyday life. In many cases the youth of today are using alcohol and narcotics to escape unwanted situations and avoid the truth of what is happening around them. I have seen it in people I am close to, watching them get overtaken by a certain drug and become reliant, losing their minds. I want to show this experience through experimental cinema.

Treatment.
I plan to work in digital media using both a Canon 5D and Sony A6000. With different lenses attached to the cameras it will work in my favour for creating a work that doesn’t quite seem as it should be. The visuals will be shot using two different styles. It will begin in a film-noir colour palette, shifting over the course of the movie to psychedelic colour, returning to black and white for the finale. For the editing of my film, I will use digital editing. As I am going to film in the evenings, the light will naturally be a bit dull so along with adjusting my film settings, I may need to enhance certain areas of the scenes in post-production. For the sound design of my narrative piece, the 10 or so minutes of footage will be set to a background music feature by Jacob Cook, that never quite reaches a climax, making the ensuing film feel very unnerving. Diegetic sound shall be taken from the
surroundings while I am filming, as I will be filming in location of the script Some enhanced effects may be created through foley.

Location.
My film will be set in a series of locations.
– The first location will be my apartment, posing as the apartment of Luca. I will change around the inside to look bare and unkempt. The main scenes will be taken in the lounge. For filming it is a good area as I have access to it at all times and have the freedom to create an effective background and objects for filming in black and white (early in the movie).
– The second location will be along the Viaduct Harbour and in an un-named club in Auckland City. The viaduct is bright and colourful, so it will be easy to find effective lighting solutions to show emotion on my character. It is public property but has foot traffic however so I will be careful to ask permission of anyone in shot, though most will be blurry is my shooting style anyway. I will have to ask permission to film in a club, as long as I am not showing any peoples faced in the film and keep branding out of site.

Vision Research.

– At Land directed by Maya Deren, 1944. At Land was one of Deren’s silent experimental films and it used her idea of vertical and horizontal time. The film manipulated the narrative to create abstract meaning and incoherence in scenes. Deren’s film used many point-of-view shots alongside continuity editing to bring together separate spaces and character personas into one film reality. This use of layered structure is almost poetic at times, as it is concerned only with the quality and depth of a scene, focussing on what it feels like. I am inspired by Deren’s work as her films really come together in the editing. Being only a novice in the study and creation of film, I want to try overlapping and editing sections of the scenes so that it seems like the progression /timeline of my narrative is not quite right – a reflection of the unrest in Luca’s head.
– The Third Man directed by Carol Reed, 1949. Reed’s visual style in this film is unforgettable. Many of his shots are tilted and shaky, reflecting a world which is disjointed. The oblique angles and wide-angle lenses create distorted faces and locations. The lighting in the film is also quite bizarre, it never seems to be omitting from the correct direction. The way that Reed uses camera angles to depict a persons’ personality, be that shifty, anxious, or confused, is something I want to take and use in my own film. As my storyline is about the loss of control of a mans mind through psychedelic
narcotics,, it could add an interesting edge to the interaction between character and his world, especially in the mayhem of the evening.