FOR THE DURATION - how limitations shape the narrative

Faced with making a 'festival ready' film on a very limited budget (relatively), the key is to find free ways to add 'production value'.  Living in an area of 'outstanding natural beauty' like Snowdonia, there is a wealth of interesting locations,  their only cost being the fuel necessary to find and use them.

This was the starting point for formulating my concept.  I love exploring 'off the beaten path', and combined with an eye for the surreal, I carefully selected the sites that the action in my film would take place.  This psycho-geographical approach was used to charge the film with a sense of the uncanny.  The industrial architecture of local infrastructure stands in stark contrast to the glaciated Precambrian and Ordovician geological sub-structure.

There is a long history of films whose action revolves around a journey across a landscape, from Ford's western epics, to more art house works (see Kiarostami).  This mirrors the classical theory of narrative, where a protagonist takes a psychological journey, to arrive as a changed person.  The seeds of my films narrative began to germinate when I assimilated this idea and combined it with the availability of a landscape, and an actor able to improvise the protagonist, given a sketched out scenario.

Lynne Ramsey's 'Morvern Callar' (2002) - more suitcase hauling.

Free actors that can act are hard to come by, but through my interest in philosophy I met a senior lecturer in the university's sociology department, with some previous experience, and the willingness to give up his spare time.

I had already sourced the central props for the film.  The suitcase was found in a second hand shop in Porthmadog that supports those with learning difficulties (Seren).  When bargaining over the price, I mentioned it was for a film, and was asked if I'd like to borrow it - apparently they regularly loaned props for films.  I took this as a sign that the universe was telling me that the case was going to play an important role in the film.

The other key prop for the film is the board game and its pieces.  The board was made during an occupational therapy class while I was undertaking full time group therapy in the 1980's, out of an old oak bed headboard.  It is actually a 'go' board ('go' is an ancient Japanese game).  

The game pieces came from a much more recent activity (but similar in intent).  In 2017 I was volunteering for the Welsh Highland Railway in Porthmadog, helping to make the tables and chairs for the carriages produced at their Boston Lodge engineering works.  One day I was left with a little pile of off cuts of 'utile', a mahogany substitute.  I was charmed by them, and took them home, with the feel that I would use them in some kind of art project.  Two years later I identified them as the pieces of a yet to be invented board game, and painted them with yellow acrylic left over from a painting class organised by Mind run at Parc Glynliffon near Caernarfon that I attended in the winter of 2018. 

Once I had secured access to the derelict Slate Finishing Factory in Dorothea quarry, and sourced a generator to power my projector, the narrative of my film was pretty much dictated to me from somewhere. 

The perceived limitations of the no/low budget filmmaker are in fact opportunities for creativity.  I think it can even be argued that the bigger the budget of a film, the greater the paucity of the creative concepts involved.  Car chases and explosions are expensive, but also entertaining.  The successful no/low budget film should aim to entertain at a cerebral level rather than a sensational one.  This is what I have attempted with 'For The Duration'.