Thursday 07 May 2009 - 10:56
New York-based production studio Blacklist has created a candy-coloured short film Le Sens Propre, written and directed by Cisma, showcasing the capabilities of Adobe CS4 for filmmaking and editing.
The short, which has a dreamy, fairytale feel to it, tells the story of a little girl who is stuck in a strange house filled with sweets, wanting to join other children laughing and playing outside. The short was commissioned by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco and is part of Adobe's Shortcut to Brilliant campaign, promoting CS4.
As part of the Shortcut To Brilliant campaign, Adobe asked artists in various disciplines to use CS4 to create a piece of artwork. The brief was open-ended, it simply required that the starting point be something ordinary, simple, and that the artists take that and apply their imagination to it and see what happens.
Adobe provided each artist with an “equation” of CS4 products to use in creating their piece and challenged them to create the most amazing, engaging content they could with the prescribed Adobe tools. With the Blacklist piece, the motivation was to make a film where the way you tell the history is more important than the history itself. It’s a symbolic, dream-live voyage in the universe of a little girl, where what you see is not always what it means.
Cisma says: "Basically the project had a 98% open brief and the only requirement was to do everything using Adobe Products exclusively. Since Adobe products are more about filmmaking and didn't really need me to communicate a specific message, I took that as an opportunity to make an experimental film focused on art direction and creativity."
He says that his aim was to hold the attention of the viewer by the way the story is told rather than centring on the narrative and keeping the audience guessing how the film will end. "I also tried to make the visual language the most important aspect of the film," he added.
As in other Cisma-directed projects, Le Sens Propre blends live-action, graphics, visual effects and in-camera tricks to create a surreal world. Cisma explains: "I think differently from animation, films based in live action are way too close to reality, it's an immersive experience, our eyes believe on what we are seeing as it is happening in front of us. But because of that I think that there's too little space for personal interpretation, some films in live action are just hypnotic and don't really make you think."
The sheer creative freedom of the brief meant that Cisma didn't have many reference points to start from. He says: "I first started to create strange scenes and weird connections between elements of the story in the universe of a little girl. My favourite part is the donut sock scene, I remember when I was a child taking out my socks like that."
He says that the project was not without its challenges: "The most technical challenge was to not use any 3D software in a visual effects film but at same because we have this limitation we have an even more organic and real result because many of the effects were made on camera, or using a lot of shooting plates."
Click here to watch Le Sens Propre.
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