The Disposal - (2012) - Brannach Film

The Disposal – (2012) A long night awaits a murderer who needs to dispose the body of his latest victim.

Role : Director. Writer. Editor

My first short. Shot on the humble A57. I must state the gratitude I have for the team who helped me put it together.

The story of The Disposal started from a series of sketches made on an A3 piece of paper. The idea was to make a film that dealt with the ‘procedure’ of disposing a body. Akin to the like of the opening sequence from There Will be Blood and other dialogue free sequences from movies, I wanted to see if I could emulate this level of cinematography. A lot of ideas came from the initial concept of a wide angled shot with the killer and the victim on each side of the frame. This evolved into the sea front shot for two of reasons.

I only had a stock 35mm lens and a 70 – 300mm tele macro.
The room we had access to was too restrictive in size to accommodate these lenses.

This ‘fight sequence’ was the first scene we shot so the rest of the film changed to accommodate. It felt very natural and chronological. I knew that the film ought to start and end on the same shot/location as I enjoyed the idea of a full circle narrative. Many of the other sequences were on the shot list but were not storyboarded, which prompted considerable cinematic resourcefulness to tell the story without any dialogue. Considering the lack of any formal training in said art, I’d say it was rather successful.

Criticism I have had (and that I fully agree with is that) is that the film is too long. Feature films can justify their lengthy dialogue free sequences by having a lengthy narrative or justification within the story. This short film seems to lack the content that would justify an 8 minute running time. That said, I wanted to scratch a cinematic itch so I’m will stand by the film to that end. Another issue that irritates me personally is the de-interlaced images that plague the whole film. This originated from my lack of experience in ingesting footage from my new camera and likely occurred as I transferred the video file types from AVCHD to Mp4. A mistake I have not made since.

My favourite story from this production however is probably quite noticeable. In the middle section of the film, the killer takes his victim from his car and into a secluded area, the body seems to have changed appearance in both size, hair and clothing. This is like due to the fact that our original victim had to leave once the first scene was completed, leaving corpse duty to fall to our project consultant. This issue occurred again during our one reshoot whereby I had to take on the corpse mantle and play dead for the camera. Masterfully obscured by the shadows of course.

A huge amount was learnt on the back of this project as well as a great many memories.

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