Reflective Analysis

Heads or Tails is a short film that follows a young man through three similar yet very different days of his life, determined by the flip of a coin. If the coin lands on heads he follows his super-ego, he over thinks situations and if it lands on tails he follows his instinct and animalistic desires, or the coin is not there to flip and he must become the ego. I feel the coin idea was a good way of determining which aspect of his psyche that the young man follows and feel that the 'heads' and 'tails' of the coin can be attributed perfectly to the two different extremes. The idea behind this film was to narrate it as if the main character was telling you a story of his day and the audience is left to imagine his day, this explains the time jumps between the shots and how short a day is in the life of the young man. As such I used a non-diegetic voice over to tell the stories and no diegetic sound made it into the final film in the slightest, I feel this made it easier to convey the young man's troubles, as opposed to seeing what he's doing and being left to make your own mind up about the situation, the voice over gives all the exposition you could ask for.

The opening sequence of the film shows the young man before he has flipped a coin and we just see him asleep, when he wakes, everything is slightly out of focus and the title is shown and as the camera focuses, we see that the young man is staring directly at you, breaking the fourth wall, ready to tell you his story of 'Heads or Tails?'

Even the fonts used for the title are significant in showing what the coin toss means, 'Heads' is written in italics and appears very professional, this is similar to the appearance of the Super-ego, wearing a shirt and tie. This is in comparison to the font used for 'Tails', which looks like it has been quickly scribbled down with no effort, this shows the laissez-faire approach to the Id. This is emphasised by the Id's random t-shirt, interestingly this t-shirt actually has the following logo on, a key characteristic of the Id is their following of their primal instincts, this includes his sexual desires, rather than actually show this on screen, a small visual representation that not many people will pick up, works perfectly, as if this is a part of the young man's troubles but he does not wish to divulge on this and instead gives you a small clue as to another one of the desires he has.

The key difference between the three characters visually is what top they are wearing. I used the same framing and slightly high angle when showing the clothes for the day, I felt this made it easier to compare the three different outfits between personas and as such, showed in a more simple way that is the same young man we are seeing.

Day one follows the young man as if he were purely following his Id because the coin has landed on tails. He wakes, gets dressed into a random t-shirt and starts drinking and smoking, he doesn't go to college, he takes people's weed and doesn't care about the consequences of his actions. The Id's day comes to an end when he passes out due to how much he has drank. I wanted to get across the idea that the Id is constantly drinking and smoking, as well as the line of dialogue "Obviously, I'm already smoking and drinking, I will be for the rest of the day", I also made sure that the Id is always seen with either a bottle or cigarette in his hands. To further stress this point, the Id can be seen dropping his finished cigarette but in the next shot he is already smoking again. The end of the Id's day is out of focus to give the impression that the Id's memory of the events is a little hazy due to the fact that he is highly intoxicated as seen by his staggering home and dropping his beer bottle. Similarly with the cigarette trick of replacing it straight away, the shot following him dropping his beer has him holding a beer again. I believe day one does a good job of portraying the Freud'd Id in that the character only follows his instinct and primal drives.

Day two follows the young man when the coin has landed on heads and so he were purely follows his Super-ego. He wears a shirt and tie as apposed to the random t-shirt, I believe this is a good way of visually showing the difference between the two extremes, one very relaxed and the other very precise. He prepares for college and makes his bed, which are very anal-retentive things to do. On his way to college he is offered weed by the same lads as seen before, he points out the future problems of such an action. He then attends college stressing that it will have consequences on his future, this dialogue displays perfectly the notion of the super-ego, he is concerned with consequences. The super-ego goes has the same opportunities as the Id yet decides to take the path that will have the best outcome for his future rather than giving in to his primal desires. In certain shots, the super-ego can be seen actively disliking some things the Id was perfectly fine with such as shaking his head as he walks past the smoker because of this, I think day two does a good job of representing Freud's super-ego.

Day three follows the young man when he can not find his coin and therefore must use aspects from both the id and the super-ego, this is the ego. Again he has the same opportunities as the Id and super-ego and essentially decides to do a mixture of the two. He attempts to make his bed but feels like it won't be that much of a problem if he doesn't and decides to leave college early but notes that it's only the once and he'll have to catch up at some point. I think was a brilliant example of how Freud believed the human psyche to work, we have desires presented by he Id, in this case wanting to leave college, and we rationalise those desires with our super-ego, the conclusion being that he can leave college early as long as he catches up so that it won't have bad consequences. Again he is presented with an opportunity to smoke weed and this time decides to have a little bit but comments that he wont do it much so that it does not have an adverse affect on his body. The same can be said of both drinking and smoking, he says that he'll do it but with moderation, he only has one cigarette and one beer. I also linked the smoking and beer back to the super-ego, he explicitly says he'll just have the one beer, this is due to him thinking that "even one episode of binge drinking can harm your health" and whilst smoking he notes that he "can afford to lose 9 minutes of my [his] life but I [he] won't be making a habit out of it." I believe the ego was represented well by the third day and felt like he was a good balance between the Id and super-ego, just as Freud believed it to be.

When it came to editing, I found that once I had both backing music and a voice over to work with the editing became a lot easier and I now had set timings for each of the clips, there was a lot of similar shots used for the three different days and just a lot of footage in general so I found sorting them into their respective days. When editing my film, I decided to make the best use of sequences in premiere pro and so edited the id, ego and super-ego separately before bringing them together in one sequence to make 'Heads or Tails?'

Overall, I think my short film does a good job of demonstrating Freud's theory of the psyche, separating the id, super-ego and ego but putting them through the same situations allows a perfect comparison between the three and allows you to see how each would act in a given situation. If I had more time and better actors at my disposal, I would have also included an extra situation involving a female, to show the different approaches each would take but for what I've produced I believe it is an accurate representation and I'm very pleased with the final piece.