Last year our final piece in media was light hearted and straightforward. EARNEST was adapted from Oscar Wilde's classic, The Importance of Being Earnest and we were fairly happy with the end product we produced.
This year however, we want to try something new. EARNEST, as a comedy, was tricky to make work, so our group decided to try something different and more serious.
We all agreed that basing our piece off an already existing story had been beneficial, so looking at folk stories was where we started. We're all interested by our own local Irish culture, so we started our search in a collection of short stories, An Chead Chnuasach. complied by Peigí Rose. All of the stories are in Irish so it was up to one of our teammates, Jane, to translate them for us.
One story that jumped out at us was Oíche Ghaoithe, or Windy Night. It's a fairly simple story in full; Set in the 1970s, a young man is lying awake at night listening to the wind, missing his sweetheart. He's been away in Italy and just as he's come back, she's left to visit family on an island just off the coast. She's meant to come back in the morning, but he's scared the stormy weather will keep them apart once more.
Although the plot is very simplistic, it seemed evident to us that some very creative shots could be used to tell the story, and we could make quite a complex short movie through editing.
We cut the story back even further; A young man is sitting in bed listening to the wind, missing his girlfriend. We plan on telling the story through flashbacks and shots paralleling the young man on his own and when he was with his girlfriend.
The more we cut the story the more we decided to cut out of the movie altogether; we've decided to try no script, no character names and no clear resolution. The more ambiguous the story is, the more creative freedom we could have with the shot types.
As for a title, we decided to use an untranslatable Irish word 'Cumha' pronounced 'Coo-ee'. It means an intense feeling of nostalgia, or homesickness for a person rather than a place or time. It fits the melancholy mood of our piece perfectly, as the whole narrative is the young man pining for his sweetheart.
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