Restraint

Our film has a particularly big focus on the idea of restraint - being held back from essentially doing what you want, due to the norms and laws put forward by the culture you belong to. Our initial idea was about portraying this through marionette strings being attached by hooks onto the characters. However, this might be quite hard to do visually, particularly on a small budget. Also, it might be quite hard for the actors to show genuine reactions to it. As discussed in our tutorial, we might be better considering other ways for the characters to be restrained, where the actors themselves would find it difficult to reach the goal of breaking away, which could result in more genuine reactions.

I looked at the work of Matthew Barney, who did a project named 'drawing restraint', where he attempted to make artwork through drawing and painting whilst some kind of force was holding him back, such as bungee chords. We took inspiration from this, where we could consider giving the actor a task like this to represent the struggles that they have with the world they live in, which is something very achievable.

Matthew Barney on the origins of 'Drawing Restraint'


Examples we came up with:

- The path of the protagonist is somehow blocked when she is trying to reach the razor she will use to cut the restraints from her body.

 - The character is chained up and struggles against the chains to reach the light.

 - The protagonist experiences more negative force the further she moves from her original position, such as adding more weight for her to carry. (e.g. sandbags or something alike.)

 - Wading through water (water resistance). See clip from Under the Skin.


 - Air resistance or lack of oxygen (not sure how this would work).

 - Fire - the fire blocks her path and gets bigger. (we can achieve this easily using the montage editing technique)


 - Something repetitive that seems to never end (such as climbing endless stairs) to represent the endless routine in society.

(A video I made with fire when experimenting with editing technique)