1987 (2021)

At the end of many years of trial and error in grades 7-11, high school film students are given the opportunity to make one great film, the whole year's project, the WACE film.
This is a project meant to encapsulate all of the skills that you have learnt across your high school experience. For me, this meant a period piece as my strengths lie in production design, costuming, and editing. I've taken great care to design and often hand make props and costumes in order to accurately portray pop culture of the era, and to colour grade footage in order to give the film a "John Huges Movie" look .
As for screenwriting; I wanted the film to feel like a caricature of an 80s teen movie. To achieve this I've written cheesy, melodramatic dialogue that is common within teen films, and I've leant into cliches and archetypes from the era, and saturated them. This allows to audience to recognise the genre that the film is intended to mimic and almost satirise. I've also included the expressionist technique of visual metaphor which is used frequently throughout the film, tying it to an "art house" category. The intention of this is to make it clear that 1987 is not a part of mainstream media, but rather an art film that mimics the nuts and bolts of main stream media, in order to subvert the meaning of a genre.
Whilst the film is a romance and a period piece it's also an attempt to criticise the film industry's bad habit of over romanticising the past without acknowledging the inherent issues of the time period. Even though in terms of pop culture; the nineteen eighties was a fun, exiting and colourful era, in terms of social progress the eighties were extremely homophobic, this film intends to address this issue, rather than brushing it aside to make more room for romance. Making the statement that we can enjoy seeing our favourite decades of the past on screen, and tell happy stories within these time periods; without ignoring the inherent flaws of the era.