Bloom State

Made between commissions, over a summer, with no client and no brief — an attempt to work out whether a single subject could carry a whole film on colour alone.

Approach

The premise was deliberately narrow: one subject per setup, one colour relationship per shot, and no camera movement anywhere in the film. Anything that could be solved by cutting to something else was ruled out from the start.

Shooting without a client removes the deadline, which sounds like an advantage and is mostly not. The project took four months longer than it needed to and only finished because a festival deadline gave it an artificial one.

What it answered

Colour alone carries about two minutes. After that the eye adapts and starts asking for a second idea — movement, sound, a cut that means something. The finished film runs two minutes and eleven seconds, which is roughly where that limit sits.

The lighting approach worked out here has since ended up in three commissioned pieces, which is the real return on a self-initiated project.

Delivery

A two-minute film, a set of twenty stills, and a short written piece about the colour tests. Screened at two festivals and otherwise unreleased.