It’s been impressed into a growing storyteller’s creative conscious so many times it feels cliché – from Stephen King to your English Lit professor:
“You must learn how to write a short story before you can structure a long-form narrative.”
Now, I never heard Stephen King say anything about learning to shoot a one-take film, but Pierre St Jean jr. didn’t need any literary advice in that area – the director of the new short thriller film Strapped achieved it beautifully. The one-take taut dramatic film was released in June and is available for viewing on Youtube.
Strapped is a four-minute composition that blends chemistry with these visual and narrative elements of the Periodic Table of good structural storytelling: Give the viewer a simple premise and a gun, and then fill the protagonist’s world with obstacles – she gets evicted, her card gets declined, her car gets stolen, hostage fights for the gun. That’s Short Story 101 – a minimalist narrative with a single camera in a single contained location. It’s all sinewed muscle – no fat.
When executed well, the one-take is the most exciting shot in film. There, I said it. Maybe it’s been talked about so much that film obsessionists are desensitized, but it’s a technique that can still produce chills after multiple viewings. Think of True Detective: Season 1:E4. Think of The Revenant. Seeing these scenes years later don’t fade the ability to take tension from zero to 100, and Strapped proves its efficacy in four minutes of screen time.
Pierre St Jean jr. is a Haitian-American director and cinematographer who goes by Blurdlifevisuals on Instagram. He expressed in an interview with VoyageMIA that “…if you want to make art, make it unapologetically.” The film’s tension-wrought atmosphere was thanks to Tofu Pierre-Louis, who shot the film. Shyla Soares starred as “Jada”, and Roddy Saint Aude and Jefferson Bien-Aime rounded out the cast.
Watch the release of Strapped here on Youtube.
