Fiction Adaptation | The Brief (17th October 2017)

Before finishing our news project, we were briefed one of the options for our next project: fiction adaptation.  I had already decided that I would be choosing this option as I wanted to expand my creative and technical skills further before looking for work in the industry, and because this module offers a lot of creative freedom - I also could not commit time to the work experience on the professional practice unit with my job (and I miss poetry from my English A Levels).  For this module, we would be taking a sonnet and adapting it into a visual film using our own interpretation of it.

As an exercise to see how broad our interpretations could be, we looked at some haiku poems, analysed the imagery and the writers' possible intentions before creating a short piece from stock footage:

After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel 
in the cold of night!

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

• Imagery
• Killing / death
• Spider
• Cold / Winter?
• Nighttime / Darkness
• What is the writer's intention / what are they trying to communicate?
• For me, this is a poem about removing a person with a negative influence on your life - e.g. a romantic relationship gone wrong, or a former friend
• I feel the spider represents this person, and the narrative voice feels an empty void in their place now that they are gone, even though they were a 'spider'
• How might this be achieved visually?
• I want to show my interpretation by portraying a couple in a romantic relationship before cutting to one of the two waking up in the night ("in the cold of night") after breaking up, to reflect on the emptiness felt afterwards
• Does it need to be literal?
• I think this poem is very open to interpretation, so I do not feel it needs to be literal, however I am going to depict the loneliness through one character waking up alone as I feel this is an effective way to portray this visually.

Here is the finished result after about an hour of searching for footage and editing:

I liked that I was able to find two clips in the same place; one with two people enjoying each others' company, the other with just one person in the rain, which has worked effectively to show a change in their relationship.  I also feel my choice to match the beats of the music to the different shots worked well to create a rhythm which is then disturbed by the alarm as the change in relationship occurs.

Upon receiving feedback, I would agree that maybe this did not need the titles to show the actual poem, as we can see enough of what has happened through the visuals - the audience does not need to be spoon-fed the source material.

Overall, I think that I managed to capture my interpretation of the haiku reasonably well and I found the whole exercise quite fun as I had so much creative freedom despite working from a specific piece of source material.