‘The skin I live in’
The skin I live in, is a psychological thriller film. It is based on the novel ‘Thierry Jonquet’s'. The director ‘Almodóvar’ says that the film is “a horror story without screams or fights”. This quote has significance to us as we are making our opening scene less about physical abuse and screams but more about aesthetics and story.
The plot of the film is about a plastic surgeon who was successful in cultivating an artificial skin which is resistant to burns and insect bites, however he is forbidden to continue with his research. He is keeping a young woman captive due to his experiments. All around the room he has security camera. He experiments on this guy and wants to change her into a woman.
The way this relates to our film is the concept of messing with a man’s mind, in a psychological way, this relates to the psychological torture of our opening sequence. The guy also has a lot of emotions and different personalities being portrayed, This also relates to our film there are sudden shifts in our main character’s personality, which can relate to the shift in the victim. In addition, the extreme contrast between turning a man to a woman relates to the extreme shifts between the main characters good and evil personalities.
I watched the beginning of the movie to see if it would inspire me to come up with any ideas, which would influence our opening scene. The film starts with a long shot of a road which carries on a lead up to a house with gates. Within the film, there is a woman that is sending food down to whoever is held hostage. She does not do this personally, but rather with a machine. I really liked this aspect of them not having any contact as it also makes the audience member feel isolation as well as the characters. Another thing that is very interesting is, what the actress was wearing. She is wearing a skin suit which enables us to see that the character is very awkward and unhappy with herself. This links to our evil character as he has ‘dual personality disorder’ and therefore has a lot of different opinions about himself.
This opening sequence inspired another idea, we are going to incorporate the use of masks. after reading an article that explains that males suffering with this disorder, on average fluctuate between 8 different personalities. Therefore we decided have decided to use 8 different masks with 8 different emotions portrayed on them. The main character will wear the mask of whatever emotion he is feeling, although the masks themselves will be plain juxtaposing the visuals. This creates a creepy feel to his persona, as you never really expect to know what emotions he is going through since all his masks look the same.
‘Seconds’
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