IDEALISM

Hey

My names Ben Wilson (as you can tell from my blog name thingy) and this is my first blog and I don't know what to write to I guess I will just start by talking through the process of making my film. Here we go.

My film is titled 'Idealisme' (it has an e on the end because it is the french spelling of the word idealism - nobody can pronounce it and half the people think it's a spelling mistake which I think is the point). Anyone who has seen the film will immediately recognize that I was inspired by filmmaker Michel Gondry. It tells the story of characters Boy and Girl who are bored with their lonely, mundane lives and develop a romantic relationship in their dreams. Eventually, their dream world begins to interfere with their realities until the two worlds combine into one ideal world.

THE PROCESS:

Well, after ages and ages of figuring out a story line, I began story boarding. I found it was very important to plan everything especially because the film involved different worlds that related to one another as much as possible. I asked my two friends Melissa Brownlow and Miles Szanto if they would like to be the main characters. I then spent a week turning my garage into a film set - constructing a bedroom made entirely out of cardboard. After the set was complete, my two lovely and dedicated friends came over for a week of intense shooting. Because I wanted to control the lighting, we could only shoot the dream world scenes at night so shooting usually finished just before the sun came up and when it did we went around filming the reality scenes. One night my beautiful makeup artist friend Annie Noakes made the actors up as dolls for the dream world, we shot all night and at about 4am decided that we didn't like the doll idea anymore and it would work best if they were real people. So we shot everything again the next night. On the last night of shooting we finished at around 4, packed up as much of the set we could into Mel's car and I forced her to drive an hour and a half to a beachside grass hill place where we shot the final moment where the two worlds combine at sunrise (except everyone thought it was sunSET so our sleepless night went unrecognised!)

Needless to say, we were all glad when shooting was finished. We ended up with 6 (I think) hours of raw footage which I had the very tedious task of editing down to 5 minutes.

So yes, that's the process we went through. Filmmaking is obviously a team effort so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank particularly Mel and Miles who are extremely dedicated actors and inspiring people. If they didn't put up with a week of sleepless nights and all of the hard work and have so much creative input, making the film wouldn't be possible, so thanks guys.

Now I think I'll talk about the exhibition opening at the AGNSW. It was so exciting to see the film played on a huge wall with actual chairs where people could sit down and watch it! And the exhibition itself was amazing - yellow walls are really in. And all of the works were so good - I have to say my personal favourite was Nick Levy's '3am/Exit Signs' which was the beautiful paintings on cardboard. It was so good. It was such honour an to be part of that amazing exhibition. 

I hope some one read this and that it helped. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.

byeeee