American Beauty (1999) Sam Mendes

Kevin Spacey plays a depressed suburban father that's suffering from a mid life crises named Lester. Lester struggles with his dead end job whilst his resentful wife, Carolyn, is a real estate agent that is trying to get into bed with her rival businessman. His daughter Jane rebels him and hates life in general but finds life in her new next door neighbor that spends his time staring into and film their household.

Lester's life turns around when he watches Jane's cheer leading performance and notices another cheerleader, Angela. Lester becomes fascinated by Angela, experiences lust and dreams of her. He finds an inner confidence within himself to quit his job, get into shape and enjoy life again after Angela visits Jane at Lester's household. The lives of Lester's family and neighbour take a turn for the worse when Jane's new boyfriend's homophobic dad finds videos of what he belives to be his son and  Lester on his camera.

In the scene above, Lester and Carolyn are watching their daughter, Jayne, perform her cheerleading dance. This is the first time Lester sees Angela and the reality of the situation turns into Lester's dream. The change of lighting and removal of all the dances and audience apart from Lester, as well as the change of music make it severally obvious that this is going on in his head.

The change of these two worlds is what i will be portraying in my extended piece of practice. My character's train of thought will be to drift off in situations when he clearly is thinking of something else, something that he would rather.