Secluded (Short Experimental Film By Michael Kyle)

OPENING MONOLOGUE:The world is a place...The world is a place where 7 billion people co-exist, all within the same restrictions and freedoms of life.The world is a place where every person upon it is consumed by their inept social interactions and conversations that leave nothing to the imagination. As a race, the main thing we lack is something that we all claim to have: unity. As people laugh and joke they are together, yet somehow alone. Everyone that is trapped within this planet and the confines of our dull existence is alone. A separate being from the rest of their human partners.This stranger walks. He walks to find a place that is exactly what we, as people, are: secluded.This is a short film I decided to make more as a cinematography experiment than anything else. I wanted to experiment with different shots and see how much I could get out of the phone that I used to record it with. It is not supposed to be enthralling or spectacular. It’s a sombre and simple take on human existence that offered me a chance to mess around with shots and directing.

It was great fun to make, albeit a little cold. Some shots I was very disappointed with. The first ‘action cam’ shot of the ‘Lost Stranger’ walking is fairly poor in my opinion, as well as the final shot which was taken in one take. It was an average take at best, with me failing to capture the spirit of the scene that I really wanted to capture as well as poorly controlling the camera phone in the high winds. It was muddy and freezing cold, however, so we did no reshoot it and given how light-hearted this project was, there wasn’t any need to really.The end was cut, substantially. There was an extra 2 minutes of footage originally however I wanted it played in 2x speed, but this was not possible as the camera I used recorded in a measly 30-35 frames per second and to use 2x speed you are required to pretty much lose half of your FPS rate. This would mean the final 2 minutes played out quickly but in extremely poor quality. Very disappointing but oh well.In case you’re wondering about things like cost and equipment, quite frankly the whole thing was pretty much free and used basic tools. That was the point of this film. To prove to myself you can, in fact, use simple things like a phone and a friend to record a short movie.The phone used is a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with a 8MP camera that records in full HD. To save myself the hassle of later adding a gradient to the film I used an inbuilt ‘warm vintage’ gradient for all shots. I’m a big fan of hands on, manual, ‘action cam’ camera work so I got pretty rough with the shots, hence the shake in a lot of them. I’m also training to be an actor and director, not an actual cameraman, so cut me some slack for not handling the camera itself as well as a pro.I used no other equipment to record. In editing I used Sony Movie Studio Platinum Suite 12. I believe you can buy this for £25-£30.For the soundtrack I used FL Studio 11 Producer Edition, the best music editing and creating software I’ve ever used.For the opening monolog I recorded on a Blue Snowball microphone.If you add up the cost of all the items I used, yes the price is high, but I did not buy them especially for this and had them before for other projects. There are plenty of free editing software applications to use.And that’s that. Not much to add. It’s not that much of an entertaining short, just a social comment that I wanted to use as an opportunity to experiment and learn from myself as an aspiring actor and director. It’s something to draw from and keep in mind for the future. Thanks for watching (and reading) and don’t forget to follow my blog and everyone involved in the making of this on twitter. Me (Michael Kyle): twitter.com/mookystHarry Dunnett: twitter.com/dunnettxMichael Crichton: twitter.com/mike__crichton

My Blog: www.michaelthekyle.com