To begin, the silent short films name was inspired by the storm that the UK was experiencing this February (2020) which was named storm Dennis, and all across the country there were floods causing a slight ruckus to the public. I thought of the sea at this time as I figured the waves would look rather rough, and in my favour, they were. My reason for choosing the sea as the primary subject of this film is because it reminded me of the short film “Train Arriving” by Lumber Bros (1895), where apparently, the audience actually believed that the train was going to come out of the screen and run them over. I wanted to try and encapsulate that feeling by angling the camera (my Huawei P20) down slightly so, for audiences at that time, it would look like the sea is coming towards them and possibly out of the bottom of the screen.

As stated previously, I filmed the entirety of the clip on my Huawei P20, which despite a bit of grain and at a couple points losing focus, I believe it managed to capture what I wanted perfectly and it only took a couple of takes to get the frame of the shot how I wanted it. The lighting I used was provided by the environment I was in, so it really captured everything in its natural state. As this is meant to be a silent film, there is no audio throughout its entirety, as if there was audio, all you would hear is very harsh wind. I tried to make it look visually balanced with the sea taking one half of the screen and then the sky holding the other, just so there isn’t too much of either and as I really wanted to capture the feeling of being caught in a storm at the beach.

NOTE: Apologies if the video is rather low quality, this site wouldn’t let me upload a higher quality version due to its file size (maximum for this site is 50MB)