Boy

Director's Notes - Welby Ings

Boy deals with a subject filmmakers tend to avoid. While young, heterosexual men’s emerging sexuality is commonly explored in film and television, their gay equivalent is generally avoided or portrayed as neutral (asexual but camp) or as a victim of paedophilia. Boy is neither. He is a phenomenon in nearly every New Zealand small town with a public toilet.

The story flows as a single, linear thread. The aesthetic references stylistic approaches taken to advertising narratives in New Zealand [integrated colour palettes, editing rhythms and structures]. A significant feature of this approach is the highly condensed nature of the story. The narrative [which might normally be told as a 55 minute drama] is now heavily compressed into less than a quarter of that time. As a result edited sequences average out at 1.2 seconds in duration. The effect establishes an unusually condensed, dreamlike, visually rich form of storytelling that alludes to the world of music video and TVCs but uses these references to develop a very intricate, intensified form of storytelling.

Written words as thoughts, comment on or interrupt developments in the film as fragmented or poetic text. The language in this text is either poetic or references the little known New Zealand bog cruising sub-cultural language of bogspeak or parley. 

The sound design is very unusual and has been constructed in such a way as to heighten the sense of dislocation and isolation in the boy’s world. This has been done by stripping out the atmospheric palettes and replacing them with the occasional noise that might normally sit in the background.