Adaptation Reverse Engineering

 

To recreate this scene I first watched the scene over and over again, to the point I was saying the dialogue and calling out the cuts as they were happening. Then I wrote a script and made a story board that represented how I would direct the scene in the movie.  I then looked through my and my lead actor Ed's cloths for an outfit that closely resembled the one in the scene. Additionally, I printed out pictures of flowers to put into Ed's room to resemble the set in the film and found a spray bottle to recreate the sweating. On the day of filming I realized I had no effective way to record that first establishing shot, so I decided to use the shot from the film. After doing this once I decided to use the typewriter shoot from the movie as well, because the only way I could effectively recreate that with my resources was to use a computer screen (which never looks good).  Other than these decisions, the production phase was fairly smooth, we recorded all in one day and in order. In the editing I decided to not try to follow the timing in the original as my edit points were different and to just edit it the way I normally would. Since an original score for this would feel weird, I decided to use the film's.  

Overall, I think this is close to the best version of the project we could produce with the time and resources we had to do it in. Both me and the actor have been very busy lately so we had fairly limited time to get it done. Because of this, some smaller details slipped through. This explains the smaller mistakes like some of the shots not being the same distance or framed exactly like the original movie. The lighting being different, especially in the bedroom shots. And the timing of some of the shots being different. The only big mistakes made were not having the actor get up during the laying down scene, which made the film cut worse, whereas in the original movie that sequence of shots cuts like butter. Additionally, some of the audio was recorded a bit soft which made it so I could only limitedly fix the EQ in some of the clips. Also, I accidently included one overlapping frame from the original before the type righter shot. Other than these mistakes I think this was a successful recreation of the original. The fact I was able to integrate some shots from the original movie into this effectively is evidence of that. Like any good adaptation I changed some pieces from the original intentionally. The set was not exact to the original but it carried the same trapped manic energy of the original, I retained the pictures of the flowers keeping them as a representation of obsession. Additionally, this version plays up the manic energy of the character far more, having less of the insecurity of the character show through. 

One has to appreciate the contextual underpinnings of this project: I am recreating/adapting a scene from a movie about adapting a novel. At the same time I have been analyzing a movie by Kaufman for my comparative study, making a series of blog posts about his life,  writing a film based on Kaufman's work, and talking about him in my college essays [tangentially]. Remembering that Kaufman has an obsessive personality, over researching things while he is writing. There is a certain cosmic harmony to the whole thing.