Cheery Point : a case study for independent film and existentialism

Abstract

Existentialism and postmodernlsm frameworks have pervaded much of recent cinema and television to the point at which viewers can experience a new level of escapism, one which not only allows audiences to leave their own lives behind, but to also take away an altered perspective from a theater to grapple with well after the screening. Examples as of late of this post-modernism "story within a story" framework are present in director Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and Inception, as well as ABC's LOST episodic television series. LOST had resonated deeply within me and brought me to a new level of familiarity with characters that I never wanted to stop watching. Protagonists and antagonists were never as clear-cut as they seemed to be at the onset, and one's sense of right and wrong, no matter how Kantian in nature it may have started, would be ruffled in some way by the end of the season. Its last episode had aired on May 23rd, 2011, and seven months later I still found that nothing within me had been ruffled in the same manner again. So, I literally made my own happiness that would center, not around a need for a group of interesting individuals to survive a plane crash on a mysterious island, but instead the need for a small town's citizens to regain sentimentality in a time at which expressing emotion was illegal. From November of 2011 to May 2012 all aspects of the preproduction and principal photography process would ensue on the feature-length film that would be known as Cheery Point. In this thesis I present a case study of what this endeavor took from a Executive Producer and Director of Photography's standpoint, and analyze how this film was conceived philosophically.