TRAUMA is not only an ambitious five-minute film, it is a broad filmmaking project that is as much about the production process as the resulting short fiction. The film will be shot and edited using 1950s techniques and materials, and will be accompanied by a making-of film, photographs, and an interactive website that documents the whole creative process.
Trauma’s script and style is inspired by the powerful propaganda imagery of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. In particular soviet realist painting, the photography of Aleksandr Rodchenko, the films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and the films and photography of Leni Riefenstahl. While this imagery was used to forward tyrannical regimes, the images themselves are, to my mind, amongst the most creative, striking and powerful ever made. Trauma will reappropriate the style, the camera angles, the geometry of composition, the industrial landscapes, the poses and the wardrobe of the era in a modern-futurist science-fiction film that questions our voluntary slavery to the contemporary digital technocracy.
Great care and attention will be given to every detail in the filmmaking process. The advertisements running in the background will have to be carefully planned and shot in advance. Each shot in the film will be precisely storyboarded, with the geometry of the early 20th century propaganda in mind.
The colour palette, will be based on those of old soviet posters; browns, blues, greys and so on. We will exclude red though, in order to avoid the colour’s strong political connotations. As important as the colours are the textures within the colours.
The script was written with a specific piece of music in mind. The track, Mute Pollute, by Henry Bennett, mixes an industrial cello motif with a tense, swelling electronic beat. Though the track already exists, it will now be developed further to fit the story.
The cast, particularly the workers in the factory will be selected with a rugged soviet aesthetic in mind; men and women of different ethnicities who each radiate health and strength. Each worker will have hair and make-up in 1950s styles and will wear identical, authentic 1950s work overalls, provided by professional clothing archivists, Moratoire.
The project is an exploration of the fibre that makes a film, it is about the crew, and about the filmmaking experience...The film will be shot on super 16mm film, and edited on an old 1960s Steenbeck editing table. On set, the photographers will take stills using 1950s cameras. Not only the cast, but also the crew will be dressed in 1950s work clothes, so that each person on set is in contact with that texture and patina of the era.
To understand how our production choices affect the work process and the end result, every step of production will be documented - camera & film tests, location scouting, casting, storyboarding, music composition, casting and costume fittings, all the way through to the final edit.