Short Film Recreation

We were given the task of recreating Martin Scorsese's 1968 classic short film 'The Big Shave'. In the space of three weeks we had to find an actor to play the role of the shaving man, find a suitable location, shoot some footage exact to the original and finally edit the footage we captured into the final short film, as close to the original as possible. Overall it would prove to be quite a challenge although it was a good test of our media skills. In this blog post I will go over the different aspects of the recreation of this short film: the casting, location research, plot synopsis, storyboard, filming and editing. 

Beginning with casting, we were left with a bit of a problem straight from the off as within our group, we didn't know any 30-40 year old men who would take their shirt off and pour fake blood over themselves in front of a camera. In the end we chose someone from our own group to fill the role in question. This actor would be Joe; he was the oldest looking out of the group and he was more than happy to play the role of the shaving man. We knew that this would make the film slightly less like the original, but as you can see below, Joe suited the role just as well as any older character would have. 

Here is the original character below: 

Moving onward, I will now look at the location research. We had to find a pristine white bathroom, and this turned out to be quite difficult. Everyone in our group had bathrooms that were either covered in their parent's shambolic attempt at being creative with multi-coloured tiles, or they were painted in colours that you wouldn't expect to see in a bathroom such as dark green and black. In the end we decided to use a pink bathroom, as it was the only bathroom we could find with a bright solid colour. Although the bathroom was pink, it didn't distract people when we showed them our short film recreation as they were certainly more focused on the man who was severely bleeding. Overall, apart from the colour, the bathroom we used was suitable as if was roughly the same size as the original bathroom used and it also had all the fittings that featured in the original bathroom, such as the stainless steel taps and the mirror. Below is an image of the original bathroom versus our recreation bathroom. 

Now I will look at the plot synopsis. First of all, for all of you who don't know what a plot synopsis is, it's a brief summary of a novel, motion picture or play. In The Big Shave, a man walks into the bathroom, removes his shirt and begins shaving as normal, however, he begins to shave for a prolonged amount of time and in doing so, his face begins to bleed to the point where it is dripping all over the clean white bathroom. Why does the character do this? Many film critics have interpreted the young man's process of self-mutilation as a metaphor for the self-destructive involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. 

In terms of filming we faced a few challenges. First of all, it was very hard to get everyone together on the same day to film, but we eventually found a day that we could meet up and get the job done. Secondly, when we were filming, there was little room for manoeuvre around the bathroom and we always kept on knocking into the bathrooms various fixtures and fittings, however, we avoided this at times by having a minimal amount of people in the bathroom when filming was taking place. Thirdly, we noticed that there was a lot of natural light flooding into the bathroom we were using. This was a problem as we noticed in the original short film, there was hardly any natural light flooding into the bathroom. The avoid this overflow of natural light, we made sure we filmed when it was slightly dark and we ensured during editing that the picture was not too bright. The fourth and final difficulty we faced was that we had to make sure we got every single camera angle and shot in our recreation, that was in the original. We were obviously expecting this, but it was a tedious task, sitting down and watching the film multiple times (it's an excellent short film though) and taking note of every individual shot. Overall, the filming was good fun, apart from cleaning up all of that fake blood at the end of the shoot! 

Editing wise, everything ran quite smoothly. We chose to edit our short film recreation using iMovie 11, cheap yet reliable software that we ran on an iMac. The editing process took a while, but it was worth the time and effort in the end, as it paid off with our uncanny recreation. While editing, we had to add the all important accompanying music. In the original short film, the music was the 1937 hit: 'I Can't Get Started' by Bunny Berigan. When we added the music to our recreation, it made our film just like the original. 

To conclude, recreating Scorsese's classic short film was great fun, but it was also a great test of our filming and editing skills. Below is a link to our short film recreation. Enjoy and don't forget to drop us a like!