Film: 'Eric's Secrets' (Lucia Zoro, 2008)

For the longer film our main stylistic influence has been the short film 'Eric's Secrets', which we first watched last year.

The film is a short portrait of Eric, 91, who shares stories of his life, his secrets for happiness, and how he met his wife. The film takes place entirely in his home in a relaxed conversation and is illustrated by photographs throughout his life and cutaways around his home. 

As the focus of our film shifted to be a portrait of Ralph's life, we revisited the film, as the story and approach shared many similarities with ours. Both films focus on the life of an older man, now living alone, with a use of photographs to show the story and create a visual timeline. 

The main features which we looked to the film for influence on is the pace, music and camera-work. 

The pace of 'Eric's Secrets' is one of its strongest aspects, not overloading the film with expository information but giving enough to establish a warm and engaging character. There are several moments where there is no voice-over, and we are just shown photographs with music, which adds to the relaxedness and intimacy. In the moments preceding Eric talking about his wife's death, the music fades out and there is a ghostly silence. The pace is slowed even more, shots are lengthened, and it ends on a very powerful soundbite - 'She died in my arms'. When looking to create a similar transition in our film, we used a similar approach.

Whilst looking for music for our film, 'Eric's Secrets' was again a strong influence in tone. The music in the film is quirky and cheerful but simplistic, reflecting the warm atmosphere and straight-forward approach without distracting from Eric. To find music with a similar tone I either narrowed the search down to 'relaxed' or 'quirky' tracks, or those which featured violin and clarinet, as these instruments worked well to convey the history in the piece. I also listened to soundtracks with a similar tone such as that for 'The Terminal' (Steven Spielberg, 2004), where the clarinet is used to create a sense of oddness and loneliness about the main character.

Finally, we took a small influence from the camera-work in the film, noting that the key to its slow, meditative pace is that the shots are locked-off and still. Whereas we did try to experiment with some slow pans and tracking shots, for the most part we kept to the stillness of the tripod shot, following advice we received during tutorials and after our poetic exercise, where it was suggested we could create a living portrait by leaving the camera in one place.