Sarah

This is a very personal film for me - it deals with the subject of grief. My personal experience of loss drew out one message - there's no right way to deal with it.
The message of the film is perhaps harder to find if you are not willing to accept it.
It is my belief that good directing is about creating "games" - the technical and artistic problems we must solve. The decision do make the film as a one shot was initially drawn out of budgetary constraints - the "game" that this created, however was a wonderful technical problem; the rules I created were that the camera had to find conventional cinematic shots that an editor would chose for the beats of the scene - each movement and each frame had to be motivated by a genuine curiosity. The reveal at the end of the film that this game created is that the camera is actually a Point Of View of the title character of the story - the blurs are her tears and her choices of where to look are driven by emotion.
The film is wholly reliant on the actors giving a totally believable and engaging performance - to achieve this, I created the "game" that I was only allowed to give an actor a note to affect their scene partner, using the language of "tactics" and "objectives". The result of this is that the artists' performances were selfless, leading to a beautifully naturalistic depiction of the story.
The final "game" was in the technical - creating in-camera magic tricks to hide actors and props in the space and create impossible scene changes in-shot without any post-production interference. Clever microphone concealment and use of trick-lighting to mask boom and crew shadows enabled our cinematographer and sound recordist to become playfully engaged in the piece. The end result was a cast and crew working in total synergy to create an ensemble piece that I am extremely proud of.