We Dive Into The Provoking New Film From Rollo Hollins In Our Latest Spotlight

I almost want you to watch it before you read on though, this paragraph being written after we watched the film and then interviewed Rollo, to ask what the hell was going on. Now we know, we want this article to promote Silence 1b, a short film written and Directed by Rollo Hollins at Armoury.

 The film is intriguing. Confusing. Discombobulating… but ultimately beautiful. Really it’s an art piece. A moment in time.. full of emotion.. a vehicle for shifting through something internal, raw and in process. A dislocated reminder of being Human and a piece that initially made us feel, somehow, really uncomfortable.

Interviewer:

Wow - We are feeling completely bewildered - the visceral and confused atmosphere from the short has stayed with us for the afternoon and we are 100% completely intrigued. Please tell us more!

Rollo:

😃

Interviewer:

Tell us about where the inspiration for the film came from.

Rollo:

I got obsessed with the idea of how we try and cope with loss, how we de-compartmentalise emotions and what mental actions we take to create a safe distance and space to let us deal with outside events. It was on my mind when I was searching for SFX for another film and I started noticing these incredibly emotive, yet emotionally distant titles that SFX use - ‘Respirator, noisy’ - and wondered if film as a medium could represent that safe space and distance to help think about loss.

So I began collecting evocatively named SFX and they formed the backbone of the titles the film is made from.

Interviewer:

What did you shoot on? We are guessing Super 8 and VHS??

It’s a mixture of 35mm, 16mm and 8mm, the film is about disconnecting from the reality of a tough situation, so I wanted to hide reality as much as possible through the medium itself. I wanted it to feel like a fashion film or music promo - a kind of emotional safety that then transports us to something more raw and chaotic.

Interviewer:

We love the way you’ve shot this so you never feel like you truly get a proper look at the main character, or any of the characters really. Was this to deliberately create a feeling of being out of balance?

Rollo:

Yeah! I suppose the idea was for it to feel as personal as possible without shooting it as a VR or POV experience. Barbara and Alice were so amazing but it was never intentioned to be a narrative - rather an experience. I wanted it to be loose enough that the viewer can place themselves in the film and be taken on an emotional journey they weren’t expecting.

Interviewer:

The edit feels like someone trying to piece together their fragmented memories, was this intentional and how did you go about working on this in post?

Rollo:

So it’s both exactly as scripted and totally different to how we imagined, haha. For me it had to feel (at least at the beginning) like were were treading on familiar ground, it had to feel like cliche in a way to drag us in, then hopefully when locked in, to pull the audience somewhere new. But that is a super hard balance to gauge in post, no idea if we have it right and it took a while to get where we are. We had to rely on totally fresh eyes each cut to figure out where we were heading.

Interviewer:

The crash scene is pretty impressive. Tell us how you cheated that?

Rollo:

That was the most fun, we shot it way after everything else. We made this for no money as an experiment, but I also wrote in a massive car crash as the pinnacle of the film, so we really didn’t know how were were gonna do it… We thought about loads of options, even full CGI but in the end we bought a ride along toy car for children from eBay, fashioned a roof for it, strapped in a couple of film cameras, gave it a windscreen and rolled it down a big hill a few times. We smashed a few filters, but everything else survived!

Interviewer:

We love the soundscape, it’s really subtle but also really adds to the sense of unsteadiness. Tell us about the sound.

Rollo:

Grand Central did an amazing job with this. We were always fighting the balance of hearing the SFX each title names but also feeling the film, so they created a great progression that leads us to somewhere else entirely. The opening has a great non-sync quality to the SFX, this eerie sense that nothing is connected to anything else.

Interviewer:

Was the music scored to the film or did the music already have a life of it’s own before the shoot started?

Rollo:

It was scored by the genius that is Adem Ilhan, who is an incredibly in-demand, amazing film composer, but also luckily my mate who wanted to do something for this after seeing the rough. We worked to a temp but the score Adem created was wild and took it to a whole new place. I still sometimes just listen to it whilst writing.

Interviewer:

What is it that you wanted to say with this film?

Rollo:

I wasn’t really interested in creating a narrative short to be sent on the circuit and to be honest, I didn’t want it to say anything as a statement. It was more an attempt at giving the viewer some space, to nudge them to think about loss in whatever form that might be. It can be really overwhelming as a film, but as an experience I wanted it to feel like silence.

Interviewer:

How do you feel this sits within your portfolio/entire body of work?

Rollo:

Not very well? No, I’m not sure - it’s definitely not commercial, it’s not even narrative and I definitely wanted to get away from the more structured writing I’ve been doing on long form projects, but I think there is a common theme in using film to transport the viewer to an emotionally open / reflective space. It think that’s the thing film does best when done right. Would rather people be feeling than thinking.

Interviewer:

This reminds the Lemonade team of the film ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ by Maya Derren. Was there any particular film you’ve watched that helped visually inform you for this one?

Rollo:

Loved that film. But no refs really. Just tried to figure out what the weird narrative needed at each beat and follow that.

Interviewer:

Do you feel like this film is a deliberate deviation from your more recently released pieces of work?

Rollo:

Well, it’s definitely different from my commercial work, but that’s only due to Nike not wanting to let me make a 60 about loss after a car crash, still time though *laughs

Interviewer:

Just to finish up…You say you got obsessed with the idea of how we try and cope with loss. Can you expand on why that was a driving force for you.

I suppose more specifically, I got obsessed with the idea of coping with loss over something we haven’t known long enough to really feel any ownership over. A very early stage relationship embodied that well, something that can feel incredibly important personally but if no-one knew about it, if you hadn’t even had a chance to put a name to it and it ended abruptly, how ‘real’ was it and how would you work with that?

Interviewer:

Do you feel that there has been some sort of catharsis through completing the project

Rollo:

I’m not sure it has any answers, but I hope it’s a surprising space that lets the viewer dwell on those thoughts and emotions for a little while…

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If you are reading this right now having watched the film for a second time, and now you understand Rollo’s intention, we hope that his gift of space landed. It certainly did with us, and also really affirmed how creativity and it’s creator are essential to our experience, and in this case the creator set the scene for us to experience just what it was that we needed to, in that moment. We think that is the very definition of Art.