Team:SZU-China/Excellence in Another Area
In this year's iGEM competition, we have imaginatively created a unique promotion video. This promotion video is not only a simple project introduction, but also a Surrealistic Romantic Comedy with brilliant creative ideas and creativity. Based on our devotion to synthetic biology and film, we tried to make bold and advanced innovations in the field of video making, and finally we presented this excellent short video. And please enjoy our work, Jeans Love!
Although the Promotion Video seems like a romantic comedy at first sight, it’s indeed a classic Ancient Greek tragedy. We'd rather ask a simpler question than that of Raymond Carver, which is: How does love change people? While designing our scripts, we have determined our motif as: Love isn’t the basic cause for character change, but the extrinsic motivation.
Although the public has recognized that the existence of film as a dream-making tool itself has a certain surrealistic color, we still insist on using a walking jean that is completely out of the real situation to point out that the film is completely detached from the real world. In the real world, the people you love do not necessarily love you. They will selectively ignore your sacrifices and changes or even don't care about them at all. In this film, the change of khaki pants was noticed, and it was dramatically accepted by the one who is loved. It itself has a strong irony, and its strong contrast with reality gives the whole film a fatalistic tragic color.
This fatalistic tragedy is not that kind of Thomas Hardy, but Sophocles, and the source of the tragedy is not external, but internal of mankind itself, like the tower of Babel tragedy, a tragedy caused by the lack of understanding and communication among mankind.
When creating the script, we used the traditional classical three-stage structure: the script was divided into prologue, interlude, and furioso. This script structure is simple and easy to understand, with clear logic, and is widely used by the film industry. The classical structure was still written in the textbooks of film studies and is considered the preferred method of scripting until today.
Before building the jeans love structure, we watched and referred to a large number of silent films, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Chaplin’s City Lights, and the most inspiring one, Buster Keaton’s The General. The palindromic of The General script structure is very interesting: the story that happened before the film repeated upside down at the back of the film; the development of the whole movie is designed like that train, driving from point A to point B, and then from point B come back. We also referred to this approach, taking the jeans plastic surgery clinic as a turning point (point B), where we designed the encounter and the re-encounter between the washed blue pants and the khaki jeans before and after plastic surgery.
As mentioned above, we hope that the entire film is filled with a sad retro tone, and the key to establishing a retro tone is to create a sense of time. However, we believe that a single sense of age is boring, which can only create a continuous atmosphere but cannot give more information. But the fusion of many different ages can more accurately guide the direction of the story, secretly giving the audience a hidden reminder.
So when we showed the life of khaki pants, we created a style of the 50s: the herringbone tweed suit jacket, the green and white checkered tablecloth, morning coffee, and even the khaki pants themselves are all of caustic irony for the Beat Generation.
The most interesting thing about Jeans Love is that the protagonist of the film is walking jeans. This surrealistic scene immediately reminds people of Salvador Dalí's strange paintings and Luis Buñuel's early video experiments. For example, Dalí's Rita and Goose and Temptation of San Antonio, and Buñuel's An Andalusian Dog. These works all have metaphorical descriptions of human organs and use these organs to symbolize the state and mood of the characters, and this is what we intend Given to the expressionless jeans.
Therefore, we also tried to match these two surrealist masters in terms of visual effects and decided to use close-ups of organs to express the mood of khaki jeans. So in this promotion video there are eyes popping out of the pants and thumbs sticking out of the pants pockets.
The most challenging part of the film is to make the soft jeans complete a series of anthropomorphic actions such as walking, sitting down, turning your head, and even tilting your legs.
Our initial idea was to use a green screen and computer synthesis to simulate jeans. But in the end we decided to use a more traditional effects technology, puppets.
We first stuffed foam padding into the jeans and then used a wooden skeleton to support the padding. This skeleton, called Uncle Neil, is hefty to keep the entire trousers' shape to ensure that the jeans complete a series of anthropomorphic actions.
At the same time, to avoid getting into the lens, we chose to control the pants' movement from the upper and lower ends.
A person is standing and manipulating two wooden sticks. The sticks are connected to the waistband through the fishing line, and the sticks are of a considerable length. Another person lay on the ground, and through two long L-shaped wooden sticks, stretched into the trousers from the trouser legs, swinging back and forth to remotely control the movement of the trousers' legs and walking.
Through two people's simultaneous operation, the jeans can be moved around naturally as if they were alive.
In particular, we have spent a lot of effort pursuing anthropomorphic naturalness, so behind a seemingly simple walking action is a day rehearsal. Besides, when shooting close-up shots of jeans, we need to use wooden sticks to hang the pants through the fishing line's connection and keep them for a long time, which is a big challenge for our physical strength.
In the exterior part of the film, we used natural light as much as possible. Most of the time of the whole film was shot in the golden hour. In order to create the effect of natural light and golden hour, we refer to Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. Unfortunately, the erratic character of natural light makes it impossible for us to capture the marvellous and magnificent light of golden hour, but we were still trying to finish shooting in the precious 4 hours a day of golden hour.
In order to create the sad and vintage tone, we tried to use a combination of high color temperature and green tones when shooting. The yellowish color caused by the high color temperature creates a sense of age, while the greenish hue creates a touch of sadness.
In the post-production process, we added the special effects of film damage to the film to simulate the special texture of the super8mm movie camera, thereby enhancing the creation of the sense of age.
