Premise and influences

The premise of “amorphous” is to explore the themes of love, possession and the complexity of toxic and damaging relationships through an experimental interview based film. The primary ideas of the piece stemmed from personal experiences over the last year combined with the idea of a cryptozoology inspired story concerning mimics and shapeshifters which began to interest me around a similar time. The writing process of the film was very, somewhat thematically, adaptive and changing due to the complicated nature of its themes. Personal attitudes towards the ideas of love often change rapidly, with emotional connections ranging from affectionate or nostalgic, to bitter and almost resentful in a matter of days, especially when purposely dwelling on such experiences in order to produce the emotional response needed to convey art through screenwriting. I also envisioned “amorphous” to be the counterpoint to my previous film, my After Effects project “FAMILIARS” and evidence of this is littered throughout the project, even down to the stylisation of the titles, from “FAMILIARS” all-caps aesthetic to “amorphous” understated and lower-case typeface. I aimed to create a more colourful, open ended and optimistic film, as “FAMILIARS” itself became a dark, starkly unhappy production reflected in its claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio and washed out monochrome colouring. The design stage of “amorphous” included high influence from green colour palettes, forest locales and naturalism, with a lot of research in the folk horror genre of film, with a lot of inspiration from “The VVitch (2015, Eggers) and Midsommar (2019, Aster) for example. The bittersweet nature of the subject matter however led to a colourful but decidedly muted palette, with the rich forest landscapes present but an increased focus on the browns and shadows present rather than lucious greens. In short, “amorphous” was from the very beginning of the ideas stage, a highly thematic film, almost completely directed by the emotional response surrounding its writing. A strong idea for the production that came with the mimic theme was the idea of playing with continuity. With idea of a shapeshifter being present in a scene but could feasibly be any object in frame, then through the use of cuts and zooms, I could manipulate the usually vitally important factor of continuity to use as a plot device, by moving objects or subtly changing them to give the audience clues towards her presence, and it was these main primary ideas that led fluidly into the rest of the production.