Client project

For my client project I am entering multiple projects into DepicT! Film festival.

"The shortlisted DepicT! filmmakers, often in that crucial early stage in their career, are invited to the Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival and offered a prime industry platform. The festival is a priceless opportunity for filmmakers to promote their work and make contact with a broad range of international industry professionals from distributors and producers to funding bodies and exhibitors, as well as other filmmakers and, of course, enthusiastic short film fans."

My first film is titled "Ask".

http://www.pdfhost.net/index.php?Action=Download&File=e51b1c53dacc15300855936ea2e16026

From watching previous entries into depict film festival and reading a lot of information about it I decided to try to write a film that would promote kinship and socialising between people. There is a 90 second limit for the length of the film, so I had to approach it knowing I wasn't going to be able to include a very complicated story-line without overloading the script with dialogue and characters, so a simple good-will story felt like the right idea.

Shooting didn't go fantastically on Saturday, one of the two characters in the film dropped out with four scenes left to shoot due to some personal issues, so I had to completely redo the shotlist, script, shooting schedule and storyboard. Hoping to get filming this Thursday.

Here are some screenshots I took from the first days filming to give you some idea of the film:

Client Project

After a discussion with Danny about my client project, I have decided that the D&AD "international peace day" is not the project for me. I hadn't really given much thought to the phrase "international day of recognition". I feel this brings up some problems. First of all, if a non-english speaking person is watching my film, they would be at a total loss, so I'd have to go about making a film that either contains all languages or none. I could of course include people from all over the world and subtitle them, but I feel this project is just too large to take on and still complete to a decent standard.

Here are some ideas I'm exploring:

I saw a few briefs for the YCN competition that looked fairly interesting.

http://awards.ycnonline.com/

http://awards.ycnonline.com/briefs/view/the-feel-good-drinks-company/

This company sounds quite good. From what I've read their drinks are fairly healthy (at least in comparison to the alternatives) and so I think I wouldn't have any problem finding motivation to work on something like this. However, the brief states:

"Do consider all types of new and traditional media, including on-pack and even point of sale if you want to. You may also have noticed that we’re big fans of digital, spending time with our Facebook and Twitter families and spreading our message virally."

I think this would probably be a problem, as producing something that is both appealing to the viral audience and of a length suitable for basing my final project on is very difficult.

Research project

"How has technology changed the opportunities for a social documentary maker over the last ten years?"

Here is the research question I have finalized. At the moment it feels incredibly daunting, as it seems that there are so many different things I can take into account, I'm hoping that what research I've done and will do will help me to shape a narrative to the project, as at the moment I feel a little direction-less.

However, I do have a great interest in the subject, and have an opaque idea of how to go about shaping the answer to my question. At the moment I think a good place to start would be with "current affairs" style news shows, such as Panorama, 60 minutes, Real Story and others. Though labelled as "current affairs news", the actual shows themselves are very much like documentary film. Working on a production of this sort could be appealing to a documentary film maker; however getting to the stage where you are able to do so takes years of work and, I imagine, a fair bit of luck. I want to luck further into these, and further into other documentary opportunities available to film-makers back in 2001 and try to show how these narrow openings have widened as technology has improved and increased in affordability.

I looked into Ofcom too. The wikipedia article describes ofcom as "the government-aproove regulatory authority for the broadcasting and telecommunications industries in the United Kingdom." and lists their responsibilities as "wide-ranging, covering all types of industries and processes. It has a statutory duty to the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition, and protecting consumers from what might be considered harmful or offensive material." This is clearly pertinent to my research, as compliance with Ofcom is necessary to have your work viewed on British television.

The growth of the internet is also going to be another huge factor in improving opportunities for documentary makers, as it provides a platform outside regulatory bodies like Ofcom from censoring or shaping your work, and allows people without the CV to work on something like Panorama to have their work viewed by possibly an even larger audience than you'd get with panorama. I'd like to look into viewing figures back in 2001 too, to see the sort of following these sorts of shows had (and what they have now).

As far as I can see, the releasing of content online has many bonuses for the audience too. For one, if there's something you don't understand in a documentary, you have the ability to rewind and watch over it again, or perhaps pause, do some research on something perhaps they don't understand, and --importantly-- to have an absolutely huge resource for checking the facts being shown. I imagine this must put much more of an onus on the creator to be absolutely critically accurate and honest, as you stand a much bigger chance of having your work criticized if it contains inaccuracies. In 2001, if panorama released a documentary that had inaccuracies in it, it could be investigated internally, apologies exchanged or diciplinary action maybe, but there wouldn't be much worldwide discussion of it (as there is now). It is left in the hands of the government to control and regulate that content. If a documentary is released online that contains inaccuracies, not only are there millions of possible fact checkers to point them out, but people are actually able to discuss and share ideas they have about the documentary with eachother online, in comments sections and blogs. Without the internet you could pretty much talk about it with the people in the room, and that's as far as it can go.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries

This is a subsection of a website I visit often called reddit.com. Documentaries hosted online can be posted there by anyone, and with each user granted the ability to either vote "up" or "down" once on things they see, which allows the most popular content to be at the top of the page and seen by everyone. If a documentary is known to be inaccurate or misleading, it is downvoted and hardly seen at all. I believe this is an excellent system, and given the community itself is made up of millions of users with a combined knowledge of a vast number of subjects content is scrutinized heavily and honestly. Comments on the content there can be upvoted or downvoted too, so if a user claims a documentary is terrible, or inaccurate, when it's actually good and accurate, that comment will be downvoted, and users can see it is probably a bad comment (and have the ability to go online and check for themselves if what they are saying is true).

Anyway, this is all very vague, and I need to begin looking in depth into these areas and more to see if my preconceptions are accurate or not.

Here I've collected together some images from works I've specifically created. I am a little concerned, as they show a rather broad spectrum of work, and I don't know weather or not this would make me seem perhaps a little directionless. I'm going to look over more of my work tommorow and see if I can get anything better, and to try to get my five images together. I think a valuable thing to do would be to contact a few potential employers (Through various projects I've a number I could contact) and maybe setup a short meeting to put a few carefully thought out questions as to what they'd like to see. It'd probably be a good idea to transcribe it and put it up on here, I imagine a few other students would appreciate reading it.

Something a few of the pictures here contain that I particularly like is the presence of both movement and static elements to the image. The contrast I feel exaggerates the two, both of which are visually interesting to me. I imagine it'll definitely make an appearance in the final five images I choose.

Client project

http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2012/categories/1/open-brief

This is the "open brief" brief of the D&AD student award that I hope to use for my client project.

The brief reads:

Peace Day is an annual call for global amnesty, and together with Peace One Day, we want you to make Peace Day an international day of recognition - and impossible to ignore. Go on, be a creative activist - your idea really can change the world.

Now who wouldn't want to do that?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/22/libya-war-cost-uk-200m

Here is some anti-peace that is being done in the name of every citizen in the UK, and we all have a responsibility and ability to halt it. I believe the citizens of this country are, like nearly all human beings innately peaceful, and do not want war. What I'd like to be able to do is show people how truly powerful they are when working together to achieve political change. A good area to research would be the recent Occupy protests happening around the world and, of course, in relation to Libya, the Arab spring.

Unfortunately I've been extremely busy this week, and hardly had much time to think of ideas about how to actually go about accomplishing my goal, but I'll get a solid idea soon.

Context 3

Had a go at writing my fifty words for my part in the exhibition booklet.

I am a self facilitating media geyser. I have immersed myself deeply within the creative economy and dedicated my entire life to learning the tools of whatever trade I'm using to express myself. I have a dream and a vision, and I will make all of them come true before your very eyes.

It has an MLK reference in it so if you don't like it you're racist.

Back to reality: this is terrible. But it was an interesting exercise. We read through a lot of the exhibition booklets, and one thing I noticed that didn't appeal to me was the amount of pictures they'd included of themselves either on set or (WORSE) sat at a PC. I seriously don't understand what they think a potential employer would think of it besides "this person wants to look like they are working".

I will not be including any photos like that, I think I'd rather just show any potential employers what I've actually done rather than what I looked like whilst I was doing it.

Two Questions

Research Project:

I've come up with two possible questions for my research project:

1. How have the development of social media platforms changed social documentaries over the last ten years.

I want to try to make my research project around the area of documentary, and I have a keen interest in social documentaries, and believe that the internet has opened up new pathways for it to be filmed and viewed. I thought there would be a few interesting ideas to explore, like how low-budget documentaries hosted on vimeo can differ in style/content/subject from documentaries produced for somewhere like channel four, and why that is so.

2. How well has 3D cinema coped at integrating itself with mainstream cinema

This is probably very poorly worded, but I basically want to look at how well 3D cinema has made the transition from novelty to legitimacy. I'd question the public's current opinion on it to find out weather or not 3D cinema is actually viewed as a novelty or as legitimate cinema.

After receiving some feedback I'm going to begin exploring the first question, mainly because I think I'll be able to include one of my heroes Noam Chomsky in my research. He has spoken critically of the mainstream media for a long time, and the effect of big money on choice of coverage has been long established, and I believe recently the emergence of Vimeo and Youtube has changed this. It's so much easier to choose the content you watch, so the audience is no longer as much constrained in what they watch by major media outlets. From my own experience I believe this has led to more controversial subjects being covered that would have otherwise gone ignored. There are a plethura of anti-establishment, anarchic, utopian, religious or anti-religious documentaries that, ten years ago, may not have been made were there not such a fantastic way of getting your content out there, cheaply.

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499

Here is one of Chomsky's most famous books that has an absolutely fantastic amount of information about the main stream media and their coverage [or lack there]of various controversial subjects (i.e Indonesia's invasion of East-Timor, Vietname War, COINTEL PRO)

Danny asked for some artefacts I'd do about this question, and how. From what I know, our artefacts are supposed to evolve from one another, so I need to come up with one I'd like to start with, so I basically have to ask myself "what do you want to know". I was thinking perhaps a questionnaire, so I can find out exactly what type of person watches social documentary presently, and how they do it. One fact I need to take into account is that, ten years ago, anyone under the age of 25 is going to have been, at most, 15 years old. So whereas I don't want to discount them, I will take it into account when assessing the data. This is obviously research, and not an experiment, but I think it would still be useful to do.

I am working on artefacts.

I'd like to know first of all