The Story
A girl waits for a date to arrive as the sun sets over Manchester. She is situated in a romantically lit cocktail bar overlooking the skyline. Her date never arrives and she gradually becomes more anxious as the music develops. She nervously drinks her cocktail as she waits but eventually gives up on her chance of a romantic evening and pours drink after drink down her neck with reckless abandon. She leaves and her chair is left empty.
The Visual Aesthetic
With this piece I wanted to juxtapose the beauty of the girl's surroundings with her anxiety of the situation but initially keep the audience guessing and slightly unsettled.
To achieve this the lighting is very low key with lots of dark shadows. To amplify this unsettled feeling I decided not to open with a wide shot of the location but to focus on lots of close-ups within the scene first. To emphasise the beauty of the location many of the close-ups include a focus pull to the view of Manchester's skyline.
The cut-aways later in the film are extreme close-ups of beautiful objects within the scene (e.g. the candle and the pink rose) again to emphasise the lavish surroundings.
To increase the viewer's sense of the date going wrong and the girl's dismay I gradually move from fixed camera shots to hand held. I feel that the camera shake implies a much more edgy situation as the girl's intended evening unravels.
I have kept the shot lengths long to give the viewer an increased sense of time passing and her anxious wait.
The girl begins to drink more towards the end of the piece so some shots are slowed down to put the viewer in her shoes.