Alice - Shoot 2 - Dark Room Scene

The second scene we shot in the film happens to be the third scene in the film. Unfortunately after shooting the first scene of the film first, we could not continue chronologically as I'd hoped due to actor and crew availability. This scene is a scene set within a dark room. In this scene we learn more of the identity of the enigmatic main character Alice. This scene was in place to bring together some loose elements of the story. From the opening scene and the scene which follows it the story is very fluid and without a solid enough structure for the audience to follow and understand what is happening. Although I believe the opening scene and the scene following it communicate what is happening in the context quite concisely through visuals, I felt like the narrative needed a scene to answer some obvious questions. The most obvious of those being A) Who is this character and what is she doing? B) Why? and C) How does this relate to the other characters (e.g. the voice of the man in the opening scene). 

We lit the scene very traditionally as you would expect a dark room to look. I knew that dark rooms have a red-heavy aesthetic for a completely valid reason - so we could not abandon that. The very purpose of a dark room is to minimise light to avoid damaging the photographs. Due to these reasons we decided it would be best if we kept the lighting read heavy, but added a light somewhere in the room to balance out what would appear to be too much red. I found that the red lights of the dark room alone were not enough when it came to defining the characters and objects in the room etc. Therefore we ended up adding a cool light to the corner of the room which provided a little bit of extra light we needed to bring out the characters from the shadows of the room. Without extra light everything seemed flat and two dimensional which was either red or black. 

Going into this scene through the opening shot I very much wanted it to feel like we were gaining insight into the life of someone from a place where we weren't meant to be. I'm a huge fan of a frame within a frame in cinema, and is something I have always admired the use of through my favourite filmmakers. The frame within a frame technique can be used to great effect given the right context. To transition into this scene I used two thirds of a wall opposed to one third of a visible character to create an extreme sense of isolation, but also that as the audience we are perhaps seeing something we aren't supposed to be seeing. The image below is the opening shot from the dark room scene. 

The images below are also from the dark room scene. The first image below is a shot of the two characters of the opening scene, Alice and Mark, finally meeting face to face for the audience to see. In this scene the character of Mark is given a face to match the voice of the opening scene and this leads us to understand Alice and Mark are in some sort of agreement or shady job situation. I had hoped that the opening few scenes combined with the musical score would really drill into people that what is happening is really behind closed doors stuff, and that it was in fact all part of some shady process that was in no way legal. The second shot below is a shot of Alice attempting to hide a photograph from Mark, as she has evidently messed up the job she was sent to do.