THE FROG PRINCESS

My partner, Kami, improvised some very interesting, quite emotional material for this short mocumentary made for college. The improvisational approach to filming meant that I was able to edit very much as I would a real documentary - there's was a lot of strategic cutting and juggling involved.
I think the tone is just right, and the dramatic flow (the breakdown of Eva's childlike facade) is as good as I could hope to get it given only 6 minutes.

The Frog Princess from Ewart Shindler on Vimeo.

MOCUMENTARY - RESEARCH NOTES

Since ancient times, there has been a belief that frogs, newts, snakes and lizards can live in the human stomach as parasites. These typically caused pain, weakness, and sometimes additional complications, such as increased appetite and thirst, melancholia, and flatulence.

The scientists of that time did not realize that the stomach's digestive juices would quickly destroy the creatures. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries such stories were common, and most pathological museums contains specimens of vomited amphibians.
Most commonly they were believed to be injected as spawn in dirty water, but some thought the animals could simply crawl into people's mouths while they slept. Other explanations included spontaneous generation, and witches.

Remedies ranged from hanging the sufferer upside-down with a bowl of warm milk placed near their mouth to tempt the creature out, to making them drink horse's urine, or swallow a baited hook.

THE TOAD-VOMITING WOMAN OF GERMANY: in the 1640s, Mrs. Catharina Geisslerin told people that she'd swallowed tadpoles in swamp water, and that frogs were thriving in her intestinal tract. Whenever she drank milk, the frogs would hop about madly. Despite initial skepticism, she convinced physicians after vomiting full-grown frogs (sometimes living) in front of professors and medical consultants.

When the famous Dutch anatomist Thomas Bartholin dissected on of Catharina's frogs, he was shocked to find dozens of black flies in its stomach. How could this be if the frog had grown to maturity in the woman's belly?

When Catharina died in 1662, the medical community were excited about dissecting her body; but to their dismay, no frogs were found.


THEODORUS DODERLEIN was another famous case. The son of a paster, he began by vomiting an assortment of bugs, before progressing to amphibians, and finally random metal objects, including knife blades and nails. In the end - after purgatives and exorcisms had failed - he was apparently cured by a large dose of horse urine.

Why would these individuals swallow creatures only to vomit them in front of crowds? Well, some merely for attention; for others it was a desperate attempt to convince others of a condition they themselves truly believed in. And some found it a clever way to convince people that they needed strong liquor to calm the beasties.


As recently as 1991, a woman believed that she had not only a snake in her stomach, but a small computer, which she could hear beeping, as though the snake were playing on it.

(Source: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, Jan Bondeson, 1997)

(Newspaper articles from http://tidingsofyore.blogspot.co.uk/)

GASTRIC-BROODING FROGS: an extinct (since the 1980s) genus of frog from Australia. Following fertilization, the female would swallow her eggs. The jelly surrounding each egg contained a substance called prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which could turn off production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Once hatched, the tadpoles secreted the same substance in mucus from their gills. These mucud excretions do not occur in most other species. During the period that the offspring were in her stomach, the mother would not eat.

(Source - Wikipedia)

FURIOUS FOOTAGE

Scratch Video is a style of film-making which first appeared in Britain, in the 1980s. It involves editing together scraps of found-footage taken from mainstream media, including newscasts, advertising, popular shows, etc. As a form of 'outsider art,' scratch videos are designed to make a statement, and are often politically radical.

I worked alone on this scratch video for college, which was initially meant to put across my misgivings about - how to put this - the way everything has just, sort of, got 'out of hand'. Intensive farming, over-fishing, massive waste, that kind of thing. It is not meant to be in any way discriminatory against large American people - which I used at the beginning of the video to represent mankind's consumption in general. Of course I chose images for their impact; with the intensive farming footage though, I tried to avoid some of the incidental cruelty and mistreatment that goes on, as I thought it could infer a slightly different point than the one I was making.

I couldn't resist using of a clip from a cinematic film (Taxidermia) - probably against the rules.

The music is the theme from Cannibal Holocaust - which is not intended as a statement against eating meat, although I can see how it could be taken that way; I guess this kind of video is inherently open to interpretation, and maybe that's the point.

EXAMPLES OF FORCED PERSPECTIVE

BRAINDEAD (Peter Jackson, 1992)

Peter Jackson's third film - and easily my favourite - was this peerless splatter comedy. The effects were handled by Richard Taylor (who, as founder and head of Weta Workshop, still handles the effects in Jackson's movies); they were realised with typical 'kiwi ingenuity,' and include examples of most traditional in-camera techniques - including forced perspective, which was notably used in shots of the (supposedly) huge 'Mum-monster' in the final. She is placed nearer the camera, on scaled-down sections of the set, to increase her on-screen size. 

The above shot, where the protagonists appear in the foreground, has (I think) been carefully arranged to give the illusion that the monster is further from the camera than she really is.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Peter Jackson, again. 2001-03)

Forced perspective was one of the in-camera techniques used in the Lord of the Rings series to make the hobbits look small. Above is an example, where the actors are sitting in differently scaled halves of a cart - one positioned nearer to the camera. You can see how important the direction of the actors's gaze is in maintaining the illusion.

For the Lord of the Rings, a more advanced forced-perspective technique was also developed. Forced-perspective exploits the static position of a single lens to create its illusion. Having two eyes is one of the ways we are able to gauge distance (a 3D camera is essentially two cameras - or two lenses, at least - placed side-by-side at a distance equivalent to that of human eyes). So, everything has to line up; if you move the camera to one side or the other, you break the illusion. To allow for moving shots, whilst still maintaining the forced-perspective illusion, the differently scaled sections of the set were built on moving platforms, which could moved precisely according to the movement of the camera.

THE BEAST FROM THE EGG (The Chiodo Brothers. Don't know when)

The Chiodo Brothers are not a big name in the effects industry - probably best known for Killer Klowns from Outer Space (which does use some forced-perspective I think...) But anyway, this is an early production of theirs. Very early. And its interesting because it uses not only forced perspective but also pixilation as a low-tech way for the human stars to interact with their stop-motion-animated, forced-perspectivicated foe.

METZ - FOREST

It was voted 'scariest ad of all time,' and graced our screens, it seemed, mostly late at night. Not a few complaints were received from concerned parents, and so it was deemed 'too scary for television' (whatever that means), and shortly after banned.

Back in 2000, Bacardi's Forest advert took us to a darkly theatrical fairytale world, inhabited by the wonderfully creepy 'Judderman' - who would lure unsuspecting travellers into unspecified danger with his Schnapps-based alcopop drink. Taking his name from the 'judders' which were an effect of drinking Metz, and a focus of the advertising campaign, he was designed to be beguiling, mysterious, and cold - just like the drink.
The intention was to bring an element of danger to the product. (As HHCL & Partners creative Al Young explained, 'If your're over 18 and you have a choice between a safe product and a dangerous one, you'll choose the dangerous one.')

The inspiration for the style came from early cinematic classics like Nosferatu, and the works of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. An adapted hand-cranked camera was used, to replicate the variable shutter speeds of early cinema; dissolve effects were achieved by taking double exposures.
It was shot in Budapest, on a gorgeous icy set that had been created for a recent film. The Judderman himself was played by a 6ft-5 ballet dancer, lending him the eerie, elfin movement they wanted. Traditional puppetry and animation add some nice touches, and the whole is completed by a voice-over by Polish-Czech actress Alicia Suszka Fielder.

Metz has has been discontinued, so perhaps as one review suggested, this was a case of the advert overshadowing the product. Which I guess would raise the question, can an advert be too good?