What we as humans can imagine doing to others can sometimes scare us. These thoughts feed off our hidden emotions and conflicts, but due to their extreme nature, most of us would never think about acting on these thoughts. In my short film, Norm, I wanted to delve into a character discovering first hand the difference between the enjoyment of fantasizing in the act of murder to the shocking and brutal act to murdering someone in reality. Norm is a film exploring self discovery of how dark someone’s mind can be and what can make someone willingly cross over to act on these thoughts.

With the subject matter being that of a serious nature I felt a need to communicate the film’s story in the form of a dark comedy to reach a broader audience. A favourite form of storytelling, dark comedy allows the humorous idiosyncrasies of characters to transpire into the serious situations that evolves throughout the film, thus creating serious thought and self reflection as well as amusement for the audience. This is where I believe true comedy lies and were the world of ‘Norm’ should reside. 

The film is seen through the perspective of Norm, therefore to subtly enhance the method of storytelling I decided to change the aspect ratio throughout the course of the film. Starting at 2.35:1, the readily used aspect ratio that is seen in most films, I decided to gradually reduce the aspect ratio down to 4:3 in order to pull the audience away from the usual iconic filmic look and bring them into the personal space of the protagonist as he confronts his true nature, thus trying to make the audience do the same.