'Cover': A Reflective Analysis

by
Ben Syme

When brainstorming ideas for our short film, my group and I came up with
the fairly simplistic thought- someone looks at their reflection, only to see
someone of the opposite sex staring back at them. That was the starting
point, which we eventually developed into our film, called 'Cover'. The film
follows a non-linear narrative, which starts at 20:00. We see the female
lead- Alex- with smeared make-up getting out of bed. Then, we flashback
to 08:15 that morning, and see Alex waking up. She gets out of bed and
puts the make-up on, whilst her essentially faceless brother calls her down
for breakfast. When he sees the make-up on her face, the brother grabs
her and aggressively smears it. Alex runs upstairs and hides under her
bed covers, not emerging until hours later (as seen at the start of the
film). She starts taking off her make-up, and it's revealed through
crosscutting to a male character carrying out the same actions that the
protagonist is a transgender girl.
The film would primarily appeal to indie film fans- the term
'independent film' is quite hard to attribute defining qualities to, however
the low budget and organic style of filmmaking we opted for would, for
most, mark 'Cover' as being such a film. The intended audience would
largely be aged in their late teens to mid-twenties, both female and male.
This is due to the age of the characters, and the issue addressed in the
film- domestic abuse stemming from transphobia- is one that is often
faced by students who identify as being transgender, as general bigotry
and abuse is often worse for LGBTQIA individuals when they're fairly
young. Due to the target audience, the film would be shown at student
film festivals, such as Screentest: The National Student Film Festival,
which specialise in showing short films from young filmmakers. Or
alternatively, it could be released online to raise awareness of the issues it
presents on a related awareness day- such as the 17th of May, which is
the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia.
Cinematographically, 'Cover' was heavily influenced by a variety of
independent films, from the American independent zombie film 'Dawn of
the Dead' (Romero, 1978) to films we've studied outside of the course,
namely the British independent films 'Fish Tank' (Arnold, 2009) and
'Tyrannosaur' (Considine, 2011). For the scene where Alex gets physically
assaulted by her brother, we used only close-ups to make the violence

feel unrelentingly uncomfortable. This idea came from the style of

cinematography used in 'Dawn of the Dead', during the scenes in which a
group of bikers attack zombies inside the mall. Furthermore, the many
shots of Alex's face (giving the film a more personal tone), combined with
the abrupt cutting, such as the cut from Alex at the top of the stairs to
Alex suddenly at the bottom (giving the film a sense of bleakness) are
largely inspired by the aforementioned British films. For the slower scenes
in the film, we aimed to establish an eerily still atmosphere, so looked to
other indie films 'It Follows' (Mitchell, 2014), and to a much further extent
'Under the Skin' (Glazer, 2013) and 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'
(Amirpour, 2014). To achieve this, we focused on the expressions and the
minimal body language of the character of Alex, just like 'Under the Skin'
and 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night' did with their leads, tentatively
titled 'The Female' and 'The Girl' respectively. Also, there are some
thematic similarities between these two films and 'Cover': they all feature
a lead female whose physical appearance hides who they really are, all
with the overall need to simply belong.
The creative decisions we made resulted in making 'Cover' similar to
an American independent film opening sequence: we rejected the threeact narrative structure (the film opens to a part of the climax, before
jumping back to the expository setup, which is followed by a traumatic
event for Alex, and documents her response to said event with no clear
resolution), there's minor exposition (involving Alex putting on make-up,
and her vague narration hinting at her disillusionment and depression),
the visual style is quite impacting (with moody lighting, and the
aforementioned use of abrupt cuts), and it challenges audiences
perception of accepted film form (through the non-linear narrative,
irregular narrations, and crosscutting between two versions of the same
character). The intended effect of this was to give a fairly simplistic story
a visual and narrative edge, underpinning the scenes of emotional distress
and abuse.
Also in the film can be seen a miscellany of film, television, and
comic book merchandise. These items conveyed a variety of things- The
'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' (Abrams, 2015) dvd visible in the abuse
scene, being an intertextual reference to the relatively gender-equal 'Star
Wars' universe, and the relationship between characters such as 'Rey' and
'Finn' as one not based on something so trivial as the characters' different
sexes, is meant to be a stark contrast to the universe of 'Cover'; a critique
of Alex's unnamed brother's behaviour. The sci-fi merchandise and
superhero figures in Alex's bedroom hint at her need for escapism from
her harsh reality, with both superheroes (such as 'Batman') and sci-fi
(such as 'Doctor Who') often appealing to a large LGBTQIA audience.

We wanted the audience to have a slight understanding of Alex's

character, but didn't want her to be so developed that some viewers
couldn't relate to her based on her different character traits. So we wrote
her to have minimal dialogue, but there were subtle insights into her
psyche (such as her escapism). For example, Alex puts her make-up on in
front of a mirror. In films, mirrors are often used as motifs of truth; when
characters truly reveal themselves. In Alex's eyes, despite her sex, she
genuinely identifies as female. She masks her physical looks- her realitywith make-up, and further masks it with perfume. When her make-up is
smeared off and her reality exposed, she can't bear to face it, facing away
from the mirror- the truth/reality- to wipe the smeared make-up off. It's at
this point we decided to introduce 'physical Alex'. Also worth mentioning is
the fried eggs seen in the film, which we intended to connote Alex and her
brother's relationship- the brother's cooking the eggs (symbolising his
dominance over the relationship, assuming the eggs represent the two),
and one of the egg yolks is broken (much like he tries to 'break' Alex).
All things considered, I'd say our film is effective. It's unsettling in
it's use of violence without being unrelenting, it's unnerving in it's editing
techniques without being too jarring, and it's understanding in the issues
it focuses on without being overly downbeat. There are a few things the
film could improve on- the 720p resolution combined with a few shaky
shots leads the film to veer into amateurism. However, I'm fairly pleased
with the outcome.