Week 42 (2019): (3 weeks til first shoot)
Story/[boards]

In an ancient cabin deep in the Finnish woods, tensions within a group of four friends come to a head when Elias, the only male in the group, refocuses his romantic attentions from one of girl to another. Following dinner Elias goes missing. The stressful situation pushes the girls the edge. Repressed wants clash against unbridled desires as the surreal situation begins to spiral into fable-like nightmare.

In this section of the blog I’m going to be talking about the story of Dead Fish, the influences and the characters. This is for the storyboards to make a lick of sense, though if you want to avoid *spoilers* prior to the short film being published, it is obviously best to skip this blog post. ㋡

Summary:

IDA and ROOSA, close friends, wait at Roosa’s cabin for their old friends MARIAANA and ELIAS to arrive. Roosa insists that though she used to date Elias she does not bear Elias and Mariaana - a new couple - any ill will. Ida chides Roosa on her self-sacrificial mindset.

Elias and Mariaana arrive, late. At dinner, Mariaana is rude and vulgar. The rest of the group try to ignore her odd behaviour. After dinner Roosa and Elias reminisce as Mariaana goes for a swim. Ida follows Mariaana and confronts her: why must she make things so difficult? Mariaana promises to try to be diplomatic.

At night, Ida sees strange, surreal dreams; a dark lake with pale women suspended just below the surface, spitting plants and weeds and flowers; Mariaana gorging on a plateful of fish eyes. Wondering purposefully into the forest, beckoning Ida to follow.

The next day things have improved and Mariaana is making an effort to be nice. At night the four recreate an old cabin tradition by wearing animal masks and dancing around the campfire. But as the dance and liquor hit, Mariaana and Elias begin to strip and have sex in front of the other two. This shocks Roosa who runs off, upset. Ida confronts Elias aggressively about his behaviour - and about breaking up with Roosa. After Ida calls Mariaana a whore, Elias coldly suggests that Ida was always jealous and that at least Mariaana is “fun to fuck” while Roosa just lay there “like a dead fish”.

Ida storms off. Again, she has strange and fretful dreams.

The next morning both Elias and one of the rowing boats are gone. Mariaana does not seem worried, but the other two grow steadily concerned about Elias’s uncharacteristic absence.

Ida sets off to the forest to look for Elias. Roosa leaves him an emotional and confessional voice mail about still having feelings for him. She takes the remaining rowing boat and sets off to look for Elias. As she pulls back onto the lake, Mariaana looks on from the shore and wades ominously into the lake. Roosa ignores her, until Mariaana dives into the water - and does not surface. The shocked Roosa rows back towards the shore, until a pair of hands grab the edge of the boat. The terrified Roosa stumbles backwards and falls overboard, and into the lake.

As she breaks the surface, Roosa tumbles into a strange and fantastic underwater world, a dark parallel reality where strange submerged women stare at her from the shadows. In this world Mariaana floats weightlessly: she has coal-black eyes and a heavy crown. She approaches the transfixed Roosa, who eventually manages to break the spell and kicks her way back towards the surface and the ‘real world’. Here she hangs to the edge of the boat until she is dragged back underwater, to her death, by Mariaana and the other women.

Meanwhile Ida returns from the forest. Mariaana has meanwhile returned to the cabin. They bicker, and a slap from Ida escalates into a full blown fight. Ida runs off and gets into her car, making to leave. Her phone vibrates: she begins receiving nude pictures of Roosa - seemingly from Roosa’s phone. Ida is confused. In the distance she sees Mariaana walk into the forest, and she decides to pursue her.

Ida follows Mariaana through the forest. She loses her and stumbles over something - the body of Elias, plants and flowers

inexplicably growing from his mouth, eyes and ears. Ida looks up in shock - in the distance she sees Mariaana and others, too, other girls wrapping their arms and legs slowly around trees, revealing their presence. Ida runs away in a terror. Mariaana chases her.

For a moment it looks like Ida will reach her car in time but one of the strange girls darts out of the forest and blocks her way.

More of them emerge from the forest and cluster around the edges of the trees. Mariaana trails out of the forest, offers Ida her hand.

Ida slowly and helplessly takes it and she is lead by Mariaana and the other women back into the forest.

*

I don’t think it’s super interesting to talk about what I think the film means or interpret different characters actions at length. I’m much more interested in hearing what other people think about it. But I will say that I wrote the script after a difficult and bitter breakup, after a lot of introspection about what it meant to be in a relationship, and whether it was worth it.
In terms of atmosphere I wanted the film to be slow, uneasy and melancholy, rather than outright splatter horror. The folk influences are there in terms of the forest, and how integrated Mariaana is to it. We referenced a lot of modern folk horror classics in our research: Hagazussa, the french series Marianne, The Witch. These were also references we gave to our sound and lighting team.

Planning ahead as much as possible was especially important to our film since we knew schedules on location were tight, and we wanted to know what the next step any given situation was constantly. One of the things we worked on was storyboarding.

In practice, the storyboarding was not as important as we anticipated for the planning of the shoot, as many factors on location came into play and changed how we thought about the script, film and scenes. I think it’s fully possible to go into a small shoot and make decisions on the fly, especially if you use an app/the camera on your phone to discuss angles (Cadrage - Director’s Viewfinder is an app I’ve had director friends rave about, though I just used the camera on my phone). But what it did do was help give us something to help make decisions, communicate my ideas to both the gaffer Tomas and DoP/Camera Teppo, so that we were on the same page in terms of mood and atmosphere.

In general I was mulling the shoot over in my mind on a daily basis. Even then, storyboarding raised questions I hadn’t thought about since it forced me to consider things in a different way. So in that sense storyboarding was a super important exercise, even if we didn’t follow the visual plan to the letter at the actual shoot.

Below, more developed storyboards for the shoot:
(1) The beginning of the film
(2) Roosa’s underwater portion
(3) The climactic forest (end) of the film

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