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Kevin Scott

BA [Hons] Film + Television Production

In 2017, I returned to education as a mature student, pursuing a lifelong interest in film and film-making. Over the past four years, I have developed my abilities as a storyteller and creative thinker, and gained organisational and technical skills across all areas of film production. My 2019 short film Please Be Seated won the 2020 Clones Film Festival 'Best Short Documentary' award and was selected by several major festivals, including the Cork International Film Festival and Entr'2 Marches Film Festival in Cannes, France. I am currently in post-production on my first fiction short, A Good Deed, made in conjunction with the VIEWFINDER Cinematography MA course.

*A Good Deed* (2021) - A teenage boy's moral compass is shaken after a decision to help a stranger in need.

The only thing on Sam's mind is a pair of stylish new trainers, and his overbearing mother insists that he earn the money to afford them himself, even going so far as to open a bank account so that he can save his money. When Sam encounters a stranger on the street begging for help, he decides to follow the example of his mother and agrees to lend a hand, and some of his savings. What happens next causes Sam to reckon with his own sense of right and wrong, with repercussions for other innocent people around him.

My intention at the outset of this project was to tell this story using a non-conventional narrative style, one inspired by contemporary European filmmakers whose works I particularly admire. Having researched director Ruben Östlund extensively as part of my thesis, I appreciated the philosophy with which he approached his early films. In an interview with a German film magazine ‘Revolver’, Östlund states that “there are so many conventions and traditions related to how a story should be told. If you try to stick to it, you can easily lose sight of what really interested you. Suddenly you think you have to pan the camera in a different direction because that's the way... you've seen it in other films. It is very easy to lose sight of the actual object.”

Östlund’s style, similarly to filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Joanna Hogg, utilises long, static takes, telephoto lenses and idiosyncratic framing, with the effect of creating a sort of ‘bystander’ viewpoint in which the audience is held at a contemplative distance. As the interviewer says, this avoids “excessive emotional intake” and invites the viewer to “start questioning [themselves] about [their] own attitude and [their] own feelings about what is happening on screen”. For *A Good Deed*, I wanted to present the moral confusion of Sam’s experience, focusing on the wider sociological and psychological implications rather than the character’s emotional experience. As such, I felt compelled to experiment with this detached, objective style.

To achieve the aesthetic style technically, I followed Östlund’s approach of working with “fixed camera settings - there are three in total - because this way you can see exactly whether something works and whether it develops credibly out of itself. In a fixed long shot you see exactly what is possible”. For the majority of the shots, myself and my cinematographer worked through the script and, after extensive location scouting, decided on the most favourable single, static framing to encompass the action of the scene. This was based on a variety of considerations, including aesthetic quality of the frame, performance, action, off-camera-action, etc.

There are several scenes where I feel this worked well, one being the aesthetic quality of the scene on the train bridge: its symbolism as a liminal environment in which the character must make a choice, to go back or forward, to continue home or to help the man, with the shifting light reinforcing the character’s indecision. By playing out the scene in its entirety, we live each moment with the character and are afforded time to consider our own feelings and reactions as Sam himself is making his own decisions.

The scene which I feel encapsulates the best use of this style is the penultimate scene, where Sam returns to the shoe shop. In this scene, the framing subtly signals the important part of the frame for the audience to pay attention to, while the blocking takes the shoe store worker off camera yet the sound design keeps the audience aware of his proximity to Sam, and finally Sam’s attempt to steal the shoes is communicated strongly through blocking and framing. As Östlund says “the proximity of the trivial and the dramatic, and how the two alternate and emerge, can be worked out particularly well in real time.

Of course, there were practical considerations as well. With a short shooting window, modest resources and an ongoing pandemic, I wanted to work within the restrictions and set limits for myself. Shooting with the style vastly simplified the set-ups and reduced shot numbers. They also simplified blocking, continuity, editing, and made it very clear when something wasn’t working in a scene.

A Good Deed

Despite the severe limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, I undertook an ambitious short film project in conjunction with VIEWFINDER, the IADT-affiliated Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Cinematography. Developed from my own script, A Good Deed is based on a personal experience with a con-artist in my teenage years and deals with moral confusion in a young mind and the ripple effects of casual cruelty. A Good Deed was produced to a challengingly tight time-frame, and is currently completing post-production and beginning its festival campaign.

Responsibility - from theme to technique - in the work of Ruben Östlund

The aim of my thesis is two-fold; firstly, to investigate how the issue of responsibility, as a basic element of personal moral self-conception and as a critical facet of social mediation, is addressed by director Ruben Östlund in his films, and secondly, to assess how Östlund’s own attitude towards ideas of responsibility informs both his choice of subject matter and the technical and aesthetic aspects of his film-making. Over the course of my work, I examine foundational, and competing, philosophical theories on which modern ideas of responsibility are based. Beginning with individual responsibility, I delineate the differences in Kantian and Humean approaches to moral agency, encompassing issues of reason, determinism and the utility of praise and blame. This evaluation forms the basis of an interrogation of Östlund’s Involuntary and Force Majeure, in which I assert that the director eschews narrative conventions and expectations in order to controvert prevailing moral presumptions regarding personal responsibility. I move then to a consideration of responsibility’s place in the fabric of social interactions, focusing primarily on social contract theory. Here, again, Östlund provokes debate by questioning the social rules and regulations and our ability to live by them, informed by his own political and sociological beliefs and inclinations. I go on to explore his attitudes to social responsibility in my appraisal of his art-world satire The Square.

2021 2022 2023 2024

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