CRUX was a final year short film project created by myself and three other Sound for Media students. Given the course, we wanted to give the film a heavy focus on sound, be it designed, recorded, processed or synthesised. The project lasted the whole academic year, with pre-production starting as early as June 2014. The whole film can be seen below.
As a production group this was our second shortfilm production, the first being EPHEMERAL. There are certainly a lot of similarities between the two, primarily that both heavily feature questionable realities. We got a lot of feedback from EPHEMERAL about it being confusing, or overly complicated, but I'm not sure that was really the case. We wanted to encourage the participation of the audience, to make them see the actions on the screen and draw their own conclusions. The best bit as a creator of that film was to see the responses after it had finished; to hear peoples completely different ideas of what happened. And that is the main thing I tried to capture while writing this follow up, while also trying to counter the issues of it being "too complicated". (One response we had to EPHEMERAL was that it was "too complicated to appreciate" which, to be honest, made me want to write something even more involved. But I was encouraged to not do that in the end.)
The initial brief stated for CRUX it should be a short film of between 10-15 minutes, which we naturally exceeded a little. That was really the only main restriction, along with the minor ones we had to include for grading purposes such as dialogue, different locations etc. Basically as long as we had things that every film has then we were free to do as we saw fit, which included monsters, rooms of red and special effects. All of these allowed us to be creative and to experiment with the audio as much as possible, which was the main purpose of the film.
The project was tremendously fun to work on, with a cast that was truly a delight to film with on a cold rainy beach in Southend. I'm sure it isn't the last time I work with the crew and cast, and certainly not the last visual work I produce.
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| The beach of Shoeburyness provided shots for the title sequence. But it was cold. Really cold. |
The initial brief stated for CRUX it should be a short film of between 10-15 minutes, which we naturally exceeded a little. That was really the only main restriction, along with the minor ones we had to include for grading purposes such as dialogue, different locations etc. Basically as long as we had things that every film has then we were free to do as we saw fit, which included monsters, rooms of red and special effects. All of these allowed us to be creative and to experiment with the audio as much as possible, which was the main purpose of the film.
The project was tremendously fun to work on, with a cast that was truly a delight to film with on a cold rainy beach in Southend. I'm sure it isn't the last time I work with the crew and cast, and certainly not the last visual work I produce.
More info on CRUX can be found on the website.
