2008

ALEXANDER PEACOCK

RUNNING TIME: 9 MINS

A mysterious individual journeys to the beach as the city falls into night.

BACKGROUND

Shot the day after shooting, editing and showing Experiment No. 1, this film follows a sometimes shown character (played by me) as he journeys towards the beach at Aberdeen. The film begins at day and ends after sundown. Mixing travelogue with dark surreal passages and flashbacks. Like Peacock's previous Experiment a pop song provides the soundtrack, this time King Crimson’s ‘In The Court of the Crimson King’. Every shot filmed was used during the edit.

DIRECTOR NOTES

I’d set myself the challenge of making something longer, more interesting and located entirely outside after showing my first film to a fairly uninterested audience. This emphasis on challenges and trying specific new things began here and became important for my next few films. After completing the edit I ran over to my friend’s flat once again and sat them down to watch the film. I watched their reactions closely.

They displayed the same distraction and casual interest as they had the previous film, despite this one being more elaborate, they did… until one key moment. Towards the end of the film the lead character seems to die on a step and then we cut to another time as he moves along a busy road at night before cutting back along with the music to his death. This repeats itself several times and a strange feeling is created, much of it by luck due to the timing of the music with that scene. As we watched this my friends smiles disappeared and they became fixated on the screen. The film ends soon after and they left saying how much they liked it.

At that point not only did I realise I had just experienced a feeling I had never felt before but that I could become a filmmaker.