Christmas Project- Behind the Tinsel

Before breaking up for Christmas we were given the brief to create a short film that focused on the dark side of Christmas. As someone who looks at socio-economics from a Marxist perspective I found this task very interesting as I found my beliefs clashing, on one side enjoying Christmas, the happy times with family and gift giving, I also acknowledge that it's original message has been skewed severely by capitalist marketing to ensure that heads of large corporations have the merriest Christmas of all. I also felt it was difficult, from my perspective, to put myself in the position of imagining, researching and recreating people who are suffering at a time when I'm so happy was difficult.

My part time job is in Romford, a place with a large concentration of homeless people, and this gave me the inspiration to make a film about someone made homeless at Christmas, and concludes with their descent into alcoholism. I had many ideas for how this plot could move and change and so to help clear my thoughts I learned from past experiences to story board a solide and efficient story board. This prevented any confusion about the narrative and was extremely helpful to keeping me on task as I was the only crew, and was also the lead actor.

In the crit, my tutors and class mates seemed happy with my work and it's interesting story, however they felt that the film could do with some kind of pay off, rather than focusing on an almost entirely downward spiral for the protagonist. From now on I will consider my stories before storing boarding and ask myself where they are going, and if the ending will not essentially be happy, but will it pay off? Will the view feel the last few minutes watching were worth it from what they saw and learned?

4X4 Project

The four by four challenge was created by Channel four as a short film competition, the rule being that it can only consist of four shots that all last 4 seconds. This was extremely challenging at first as coming up with a narrative for such a restricted format is never easy. The break came as we realised that these had to be short and entertaining, and what else is short and entertaining? Jokes. And so we decided that 3 shots woulda be build up, leading the viewer in one direction before the four delivered a punchline that surprised the viewer in a humourous way. Once the lay out was settled we sat down for a brief brainstorming session, this would have worked better if we had written down or recorded our process better for future reference, however we were rushing to meet a deadline and therefore did it all verbally and shot the short minutes later, a comedy about a date that is going well up until the 4th shot when a disagreement over condiments ruins everything. In the Crit we received heavy praise for the piece, the main compliments going towards pacing which allowed us to fit in all the necessary information in the first 3 shots while slowly timing the punch in the fourth for maximum comedic pay off. I learned from this that all comedy is based on delivery and time, and that for future comedy Projects, to make it work, many takes of the same line delivered to the best of their time will have to be taken in order to get the best result.

transcription project week 2

After the success of the initial tests i performed with class mates, i picked out 5 people i knew, ranging from close friends to near strangers, who i thought would provide a range of interests and passions to talk about. A challenge was keeping the premise a secret from them in order to gage realistic arguments from the participants, especially since i had already run test interviews with other class mates, but this turned out to be very worth it as much of the humour of the documentary comes from the blindsides participants who did not expect the interview to go this way.

Another challenge of the interviews at the start was building the confidence to criticise strangers for something they cared about, i learned i simply had to remind myself that in a few minutes they would be laughing with me when they understand the premise, and the further i pushed them, the more they would enjoy it when they come to watch it later.

overall i feel the documentary was a huge success and i received unanimous praise from my class mates and tutors, i feel from now on i will aim to make all of my films comedy based to entertain my audience, and wok with like minded people who want the same thing.