Evelyn - The Short-Film | Process

Our project title is Evelyn. The reasoning behind this title is the focus on Evelyn’s story, despite the fact that we are relocating it to the UK. Our logline is: “The tragic story of Evelyn McHale's immortalisation through the lens of a photographer”. Our film follows the story of Evelyn McHale, a suburban housewife who becomes overwhelmed with the complexities and expectations of being a woman during the 1940s. The tragic story of her life and death is not as unbearable as the immortalisation of her through the lens of the voyeurs who exploit her tragedy and reduce her to beauty. Evelyn McHale's story has been one that has not been properly told. However, the image of her death has become iconic and used by many for different purposes since. Her story is full of interest and intrigue as she attempted to alter what it meant to be a woman struggling with mental health in the 1940s. We wish to do her justice and tell her story in the way that she would have wanted. We presented Evelyn's story in the most beautiful and artistic way we, as creatives, could imagine. This, we believe, is deserved as Evelyn McHale has influenced so much and yet gained so little. In my third year of University, I understood how much I love directing. Throughout my practice and my filmmaking journey, I have learned more and more about this skill. This year, I have decided to focus on Directing and Acting and put those two practices together to create a film that comes from every one of our group's hearts. It is an important project to us, and having seen the development of the film from the very beginning, we all have a closeness to the characters of the story and a distinct awareness that other actors who would have been hired would not necessarily have. I am working on the technicalities of this. Ailish Pinkham, the screenwriter, will also be the Assistant Director for our project. This means that whenever I am on set physically acting, she will be taking over my role and directing the crew. I will still be able to direct the other actors, but Ailish will be able to see the result of the footage and direct our performances further. I have always heard of Actors/Directors who work on the same project, and I have always found this fascinating. I truly believe that this is a great opportunity for me to try something new, and put my two greatest passions together. For our final mood board, we decided to include not only props but themes, colours, expressions, makeup and clothing. Our Art Director Filippo Pellegrino put this document together and highlighted the elements of the film that stood out to him that we should all aim to recreate. We included an old camera in the mood board which we have also just successfully received. It is an original 1940s camera and the photographer will be using it on the day of Evelyn's death. We also decided on lipstick and clothing colours to convey meaning in the best way possible. Our script went through some changes recently due to the change of locations. We originally thought of the elevator scene, but we subsequently changed it to a staircase scene. The reason for this change is that we imagined that the staircase would give a more rushed feeling to the scene. Evelyn will in fact not be standing still, but she is actively reaching the highest point of the building as she is confident about her decision and about her next step. During the staircase scene, we have also added an abstract shot of her watching past memories of family, friends, and experiences on old televisions. This will allow us to build more character in a short amount of time. As for the production schedule, our idea was to allow us to have a few reshoot days so that we can check the footage and sound, download it, and keep it stored safely just in case something went wrong. We added the crew arrival times and separated the amount of time we would spend on each shot and scene, and alongside the shot list which is being created, these will give us the space to focus more on the filming days rather than trying to divide the time on the day. During our editing slots, we came to the realisation that we had too much footage for a ten-minute short film. We had many important scenes for the storyline, where we had gone into detail about the characters who surrounded Evelyn's life. Some of these are the parents (the mother particularly), the sister and the husband, the dinner party friends, her fiancé Barry Rhodes and the photographer. We sat down and discussed who the main characters are and which scenes we had to keep to make the story as clear as we possibly could for the audience. We also went through the timeline of the story and made sure people would be aware of the days when these events happened. This is why we included the calendar with the circled date for Barry's birthday and the desk calendar on the professor's desk. Colour grading began yesterday and we started by white balancing the colours in Da Vinci. we then dealt with exposure, contrast, brightness and more. Many of our scenes have sunlight, and it sometimes made our shots overexposed. We managed to balance the exposure in post-production by lowering the highlights and the shadows. Another main part of our editing process was looking for the correct sounds to use. A lot of our sound is non-diegetic and we need to find sounds that are not contemporary and fit our story. For example, we have the impact scene where Evelyn hits the car, and we need to find a car crash sound that works for the action. It is a difficult process but as we edit we are continuously surprised and glad that our film is looking the way we wanted it to. For our project I developed my understanding for organisation and planning. I worked closely with our producer Callum so that we could get the most of our work and have our plans organised well in advance so that we would then properly focus on our film and pre-production. Our film connects to industry contexts because on social media, especially Tik Tok, these stories generally go viral and are discussed in the comment section of the posts. People usually start discussions, arguments or just share their point of view on the matter. As we were looking into Evelyn McHale’s story, we realised people mostly tend to talk about the picture rather than the story, her feelings, what happened the days before or give context about her family experiences. The story is seen, shared and discussed in the exact way that she wouldn’t have wanted it to. These videos (and the picture) still being circulated without delving into her story is not respectful or fair seeing the circumstances of how Evelyn was feeling and what she was going through. This is why our short-film is so important right now, because it sidetracks that current on-going discussion and gives people a different perspective. At the end of the film, during the dark room scene, we included her voice-over letter to let the audience be fully aware that the printing of the picture, and then the photographer subsequently putting it on the papers was never her wish. Our aim is to make a few changes to our short-film, increase the length a little, and send it off to as many film festivals as we possibly can. With the mixture of British, Greek and Italian culture in our group we have a wide range of festivals and contacts to reach out to about our project.