Fin d'Été
Summers End
When two friends return to the house where they spent their childhood summers, they uncover memories, explore familiar terrains, and examine their feelings for one another.
A short film about negotiating one's relationship with the past, Fin D'été asks what happens when two people share the same history but remember it differently. Can two people with different understandings of the world unravel their past, without unravelling what holds them together?
Cast
Clementine Lorieux (Elodie)
Illyes Salah (Yannick)
Produced by
Ambarish Manepalli
Jonathan Shipley
Sam Gordon
Screenplay
Jonathan Shipley
Director
Ambarish Manepalli
Director of Photography
Sam Gordon
Editor
Matylda Dymek
Sound Design
Claire Cahu
IMDB
Director's notes
Ambarish Manepalli
Sam first approached me about directing a short film at the end of Summer 2012. I had just gotten married in June and I basically told him, listen, if you can set it up I’m interested in directing. He introduced me to his dear friend Jonathan Shipley and said that Jonathan would write it and we could shoot it in France.
Jonathan started creating a fascinating and arresting world of memory and relationships using the extremely rare condition – hyperthymesia. A sufferer of hyperthymesia remembers everything, absolutely. This inspired me to think about how someone could have a normal life with this cursed gift. After much discussion we talked about a couple: two friends. He would be Yannick and he would be the remember-all, and she would be Elodie, a childhood friend who ultimately helps him “normalize”
We didn’t have much time and we weren’t all in the same place either. Sam and I were in Paris and Jonathan was in Brighton. And importantly, we had no money. We realized this had to be a film shot by us with a few key collaborators: okay, just us.
Thankfully we had a Red Scarlet 4k cinema camera that Sam and I had invested in. Jonathan was trained in sound recording and we had 2 zoom H1 recorders and lavalier microphones and we decided this would be how we’d do it. A truly skeleton crew of 3 and 2 actors.
I started thinking about shooting style and how I wanted to be free. Initially we discussed stable tripod shots but the more I thought about our limitations and how I wanted to follow the interior life of Yannick, we decided to shoot mostly hand held. This gave our images a more fragile, fragmented feel. We wanted the colors to be natural and lush, to highlight the greens and the quality of light, so we chose to stay with our Canon lens kit and a truly guerilla style handheld kit. Permits? What permits?
After we got the first draft I translated it into French and set about looking for actors. Illyes and Clementine immediately sprang to mind as I had worked with them before and they knew each other very well. They have an easy rapport and Illyes has deep, sometimes haunting eyes that can express so much with so little. Clementine’s energy provided a good foil to Illyes’ character choices.
We shot over 4 days in Giroussens, France. A small town near Toulouse, Giroussens was a perfect backdrop. I did not know it all but that was a great exercise in creating on the spot. After an 8 hour drive from Paris, we opened up Sam’s grandmother's house and I immediately fell in love. Looking at the different angles and seeing how we would set up the different rooms.
We had a covered pool that was half full of rainwater, we had a lovely hill that descended into a view and we had many trees and birds. In the nearby towns we had markets and swimming locations, so we decided to improvise and see what we could find. We filmed Illyes and Clementine in moments of improvisation as well as our scripted scenes and we allowed the greater depth and fluidity of the improvisations to leak into the film.
Sam shot some lovely reaction shots in the garden and I followed our actors around with a camera in town and through field. We were free, and this was absolutely how I wanted to make films. A small light crew that could react to what the actors were doing in the moment.
We didn’t have a proper sound engineer, we didn’t have any makeup or hair or trailers or craft table, but we had what mattered, which was a desire to tell a story and to capture moments with beautiful images.
This process continued through the post-production process. We were fortunate to have Matylda Dymek’s keen eye for storytelling to help us shape this film. We started from Jonathan’s original script and then wove in the various bits of improvisation and happy accidents that occurred during the filming. It was a deliberate process that took us a few iterations. Editing for the better part of a year and a half, between full-time jobs, it was a collaborative process in spite of the distance separating Sam, Matylda and myself (in Paris) from Jonathan (in England). We had numerous screenings and then hopped on chat with Jonathan afterwards to hear his thoughts and have frank discussions on where the film was. All in all it was just what the film needed to blossom and develop.
Matylda and I found different ways to structure the film in regards to the original script that still maintained the same sensibility of Jonathan’s original work. We found lovely moments that were completely unscripted including the walking through the fields and sitting on the overlook where the two characters share a moment while other dialog plays over the scene. I think we were able to strengthen an already strong story.
The final steps were sound design and color grading. For grading I chose to grade it myself using Davinci’s powerful Resolve Lite program. I was able to coax some warmer tones when needed and cool down otherwise warm scenes for a desired effect. From the beginning we had decided that this was to have a natural color palette focusing on the greens and golden light of the region. Sam trusted me with the footage and we stuck to this idea so as to not complicate the story. We wanted the audience to feel that they were in the room with our two protagonists.
This is where Sound Design became a hugely important part of the process. I was lucky to work with Claire Cahu who has edited and designed numerous films and graciously allowed us to piggy back into another film's mixing session. We spent 4 nights going over the soundscape of the film. Cleaning up the dialogue and even doing a little bit of re-recording. Amazingly we had only the sound of the Zoom recorders and Giant Squid microphones for the most part and sometimes a boom admirably piloted by Jonathan. Claire did a fantastic job of allowing me to explore some atypical sound ideas. We used sounds of wind and nature in unique ways to heighten the sense that Yannick’s internal state were reflected in the outside world. We pushed certain ambient noise to an extreme and our guiding principle is that the sound is a pathway into his condition and his recollections.
Over two years later, here we are. I’m extremely proud of the work we created and am happy to have found 4 new collaborators in my filmmaking career. Fin d’été was my first short film shot entirely in French working with two crazy Englishman, a Swedish, Polish editor and a French Sound designer and I hope it’s not my last.
Production Notes
Jonathan Shipley
Looking back, the way in which we made this film mirrored perfectly the subject that we chose. We wanted to make a film that was about nostalgia, memory, relationships and solitude – taking characters away from their everyday lives and plunging them deep into territory imbued with emotional resonance. The geography of the South of France was important, because for myself and Sam it evoked strong feelings of long, half-remembered summers, and working with a small team while mining memories of family holidays seemed both essential and fitting.
In our film, Elodie and Yannick put aside their everyday lives and retreat somewhere where they can find the emotional space to think about their lives and their relationship with each other. As me and Sam drove South to begin filming, leaving our work and our lives behind, we felt progressively looser, felt a bit of that freedom and openness.
Shooting Fin D’été was emotional, cathartic and liberating – it enabled Sam and I, who are very close friends who lived in different countries, to spend time together and was a great opportunity for Sam and Ambarish to explore their creative partnership. It gave everyone a chance to empty their minds and focus their energies on something creative, and to forge new friendships. Anyone who visited the set and witnessed the careful way that Ambarish woke me from a heavy sleep each morning would know that making Fin D’été was more than just a job. When the cameras were turned off, conversations flowed out of our collective experience and elements found their way back into the film the next day.
It was tremendous fun. But not without its challenges. When we planned the shoot, part of the appeal of filming in Giroussens was the wonderful light and the stunning scenery. We shot in August, expecting huge blue skies to bathe the countryside with light, but when we arrived we found the weather overcast and changeable, yet still hot enough to make camerawork distinctly uncomfortable.
Swimming was an important part of the film, for we wanted our characters to return to the activities of their childhood, but we found that the swimming pool we had was disintegrating from within. One night, a terrific electrical storm forced us out into the hammering rain to try to cover the pool back up with its rotting, stiff tarpaulin. It was like trying to steady a listing ship in the middle of the Atlantic. The memory of us battling the elements, shrieking with laughter (and alarm), will stay with us.
The next day, we found a stunning patch of river to swim in. Our actors stared at it and asked, anxiously, “will it be cold?”. By now the sun was out, so we reassured them, “no, of course not, it’s a warm day”.
The Aveyron river runs straight from the icy tops of the Pyrenees, so of course it was no such thing. But the scenes we shot were beautiful.
In retrospect, the weather was perfect; the dark foreboding clouds seemed to speak for the troubled Yannick and the fast changing sky for the way the past and the present were in contact competition for his attention. Memories are mysterious things - our past is tremendously important in how we shape our lives and our relationship with the world, but no two people remember things the same way. In writing Fin d’été, I wanted to find out what would happen when two people’s understanding of their own history was too dissonant to allow them to understand their past or embrace a future together.
Collectively, over the course of four days, and in the months of editing that followed, strands of the story were flipped, explored and resolved in ways I had not planned, and thanks to the extraordinary contribution of the whole team, the story took its own course. Even the weather had a say.
What will stay with me is the way that for the best part of a week we worked together, lived together, ate together and pooled our creative ideas with excitement and enthusiasm. We made a film that contained something personal for all of us; the various friendships that we brought with us or discovered that week are all in there – whether in Illyes and Clementine’s improvisations, in the loose, free, trusting way the scenes were captured, or in the script, which became more heartfelt and personal as we went.
Ambarish’s directing style is confidential, precise, adaptive. Sam’s camera work is instinctive and fluid. And we love our actors; Illyes is calm and sincere, capable of real depth, and Clementine is amazing, emotionally very direct with the ability to snap between playful and stern. They brought the characters, and the ideas that I started with, vividly to life.
Creators
Ambarish Manepalli – Director/Producer
Ambarish was born in India. He attended Columbia University and studied theater. After graduating and a short stint as a professional actor, he realized that he wanted to make films. So off he went, back to Columbia where he studied under fantastic teachers: Eric Mendelsohn, Tom Kalin, BetteGordon, Katherine Dieckmann, Christina Lazaridi and the late, great Lewis Cole. His first major short, ISMAEL, earned Faculty Honors in 2007. His thesis film, A WINK OF THE EYE, co-written by Chris and produced by Geoff, premiered at the 2010 Palm Springs International Shortfest, where it received a special citation for student filmmaking. The short went on to win the John Teece Audience Award at the Ashland Independent Film Festival and Best Director and the Audience Choice Awards from the Seattle Shorts Film Festival. In 2008, Ambarish was selected as a visiting director at La fémis, France’s prestigious national film school, and worked with French students and film professionals to create the short film CHASSÉ CROISÉ. He currently divides his time between New York and Paris. His latest French project was an 8 episode web series called QUI CONDUIT? (Who’s Driving?) that received the Orange (telecom) Artistic prize in 2012. He works as a writer, director, and editor for clients such as Buzzfeed, Lancel, Nestlé, Canal +, Microsoft, La Société du Grand Paris, Nanda Home and the international science initiative, Wiser-U. Ambarish lives with his family in Los Angeles.
Jonathan Shipley – Writer/Producer
Jonathan was born and raised in London, England, but has lived in Brighton on the south coast of England for over half his life. Jonathan graduated from Sussex University, where he studied English Literature, and works as a publisher, having graduated from working on a dictionary of music to developing textbooks, and now publishes a small trade non-fiction list covering subjects as diverse as personal development, lifestyle, business and creative writing. He has spent much of the last twenty years writing things down, sometimes for his award winning blog, sometimes for personal writing projects, and often just for his own pleasure. He has written three screenplays, is working on a fourth, and spends a lot of time taking photographs, making little films, and writing music. In 2011 he wrote a song every week of the year, recording them and making videos for each one, which he shared online, to the bemusement of his friends.
Sam Gordon – Cinematographer/Producer
Sam was born in London, England, and studied Psychology of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, before completing his postgraduate degree, in Philosophy, at the University of Sussex. After graduating, Sam tried his hand at a number of careers including Waiter, Bartender, Diving Instructor, Headhunter, Video Games Exec and English Teacher, before migrating to Paris and launching his career as a film-maker. While there he worked on a number of independent film making projects, including a series of short documentaries for the charity Depaul, examining their work in the UK, the US, Ireland, and Ukraine, and directed a series of films for the Paris-based literary arts magazine, Her Royal Majesty. After moving to New York City in 2013, Sam worked as Head of Live Production at Piranha NYC an award winning Digital Agency, Post production and VFX house. This comprised the roles of Producer, Director of Photography, Editor. There he specialised in aerial cinematography for high-end real estate projects, shooting extensive footage from helicopters over Manhattan and beyond. In 2015 Sam returned to the UK to work as a freelance DoP and Producer, and head of Red Paint Films. His passion remains narritive drama, but craft beer comes a close second.
Matylda Dymek – Editor
Matylda Dymek was born in Warsaw, Poland, grew up in Scandinavia, educated in the UK (MA in History of Art at Edinburgh University, and another MA at the London School of Arts) and in Poland (film editing at the prestigious National Film School in Lodz). She began her editing career in London working for among others the BBC and continued to edit the Polish "ER" watched by over 2 million viewers weekly. She was also the 2nd editor on the short feature “Come to Me”, directed by Ewa Banaszkiewicz, which received awards at the Polish "Oscars" in Gdynia and was screened at numerous festivals including Telluride Film Festival. Matylda has not forgotten about her Scandinavian roots and works regularly for the Swedish National TV on their Matylda is based in Paris and she’s preparing a documentary feature about the Swedish Royal family, commissioned by the Swedish National TV.
Matylda is the proud owner of a substantial hippopotamus collection.