Author: Serena Papa-Sokal

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Lila the Lemon in London

This is the ‘coming of age’ of  Lila the Lemon. She is on a journey to self-discovery. As she rolls around London, she not only physically changes shape but emotionally as well. She finally escapes the shackles of her past by crossing that line to the outside world: London.

I am happy the way the light in the beginning and the end turned out, however, I feel like I could have used a second light to enhance the footage, as it was grainy in the darker scenes. I also feel like I should have brought a tripod to make my footage less shaky. I will be more careful next time with the framing, as there are some scenes where you can see the tripod for the LED (please note that the zoom out and the fact that you can see someone holding a light was done for comedic effect). There are also some scenes that miss some continuity. Finally, I forgot to film an establishing shot, showing the whole store that (Lila) the lemon sat in.

I thought this idea would be funny to produce. It was a spontaneous decision, so I was unable to create a storyboard in time for it (hence the choppy cuts from one shot to another) and find the right equipment.

Special Thanks:

I would like to thank Sanaa and Lila the Lemon for their cooperation in this project. Thank you Sanaa for helping Lila roll around the set and holding the LED at the right angles. Thank you Lila for agreeing to be the main role for this inspiring coming of age short film.

(I am running on 4 hours of sleep, don’t mind me.)

lives.

While editing, I played around with the colours and, in the first clip, I tried to accentuate the golden light beaming through the clouds. I brought down the brightness and the blue hues to bring out the yellows; I also cropped it to centre the main subject.  I then sped up the next scene as a sort of ‘time skip’ transition. The third clip is an establishing shot: an overview of most of the scene I will zoom into in the later clips. And finally, I added a vignette on the security guard in green to highlight him and the ‘peeping tom’ (ripley haha) effect.

I filmed all three postcards at golden hour.

Postcard 1: Gates to Heaven

While I was looking for a location to film, I looked to the sky and saw this beam of light that reminded me a lot of the ‘holy light’ that shines from heaven that is depicted in many religious artworks; hence the title: “Gates to Heaven”. I think I could have framed this one better by positioning the main element more in the centre and directing the camera’s focus onto it (I was using manual focus, perhaps if I used auto focus it would have worked better).

Postcard 2: Walking Storybooks

Our personalities are formed through stories: memories, experiences, emotions, so I don’t believe it to be wrong to think of individuals as walking storybooks; we are all intertwining stories, meeting, passing one another.  I was going for a miniature effect (think of a zoomed out shot of the Sims or maybe a shot of someone spying from a window) by using the frame-in-frame technique (using the metal bars of my kitchen window to frame the scene).

Postcard 3: Ripples of Elegance

As I looked down to the river, I saw a swan floating and grooming itself. The ripples alongside the reflections in the water gave a nice texture that I wanted to capture; they were almost hallucinating. The ‘elegance’ in the title refers to the swan causing the ripples, as these animals are often described as such. I used the windowsill as a foreground element to give more depth to the scene and occupy the empty space, however, the swan unfortunately drifted behind it, and stayed hidden for the rest of the shot.

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