The Digital Video Production was our next module. I had done a small amount of video editing before this year so I was very excited to start this project. My group partner, Fran, and I decided to do a video that recorded a student night out. Below is our Story Board and Treatment, as this describes our intentions of how we wanted the film to end up.
TREATMENT
The main theme/central message we hope to portray and document throughout our five minute video is to take the audience through the journey of one night as a young person/possibly student on a typical binge drinking 'night out'. A typical 'night out' is full of energy, chaos and intoxication so therefore, to portray this intense experience we aim to base our film on a visual, quite abstract theme, using colour, repetition and an upbeat tune acting as a soundtrack. To ensure that this process of a 'night out' is fully experienced and to illustrate the change in physical and mental state of minds due to drinking, we are going to split the film into three sections, like that of 'Requiem for a Dream'. In the beginning, the film will demonstrate the beginning of the night, including a sense of sobriety, yet lots of intense excitement, gained through the choice of music used. This journey will be experienced in terms of viewing the character and also from the character's perspective. The second chapter or emotion felt through the film will act as a climax to the ending scene and finally the third and final section will portray intoxication. Throughout the filming, we hope to use close-ups and tight cropping, to create and interesting composition. The majority of the footage will be close-up shots, to enable us to add a sense of mystery as the entire clip of what we are documenting will remain unrevealed. However, in order to illustrate the three set sections/states of mind, we will use some motion, such as zoom in/out or staggering the camera illustrating the change in state from sobriety to intoxication. The beginning of the plot/storyline will illustrate a person eager to get out. This will show them preparing to go out and their journey out. We will document short clips/scenes of the duration of the night ending with their return home to where the film began. We hope to create a juxtaposing scene from the opening to ending scene as in the beginning it will be quite epic, however ending in drama. To create a sense of anxiety, we will not reveal the final state of the main character, to leave the audience questioning what has happened? Our underlying message of our film is to demonstrate the choices in life people make and our rapid adaption to modern-day society. Like in 'Trainspotting' the audience is left wondering whether Renton chose life or a final hit, in our case we want the audience to question why we choose certain things in life? Some may take our film as exciting, intense and a basic journey of a night out, yet others will then question why we live like this? Consequently our film is aimed at a broad audience as we all experience life. It is more so directed towards the younger generation as they can relate more so to this choice in lifestyle as it is today. We feel our main purpose and desired outcome of the video is to on one hand push and test ourselves in areas of video skills as this storyline provides much scope to investigate and experiment with technical and conceptual aspects but even more so, we want the audience to reflect and think about our lives today and the choices and decision we have. Our final video may be seen in two lights, on the one hand a documentary but also due to the way in which we hope to film it along with the music, it may act as a trailer for a film (like Skins) due the tightly cropped clips acting as previews and the rapid change between scenes, possibly only revealing sections of a greater storyline (if it was to act as a film trailer). In respect to our scheduling and timing, we must finish the film by the 20th February so therefore we have initially planned out our schedule and delegated the tasks to each member of the team. (see production diary).
When researching for this module both me and Fran looked into films and tv shows that have a similar theme to our video. Below is some of that
research.
HUMAN TRAFFIC was made in 1999 and was both written and directed by Justin Kerrigan. The film follows a group of friends who live in Cardiff as they go clubbing over the course of one weekend. In the film the characters take drugs and have various sexual partners, the film also looks at the aftermath and effects of this behaviour.
Although Human Traffic covers many things that we don’t in our film, such as drug use and sexual exploits I still feel the films are closely linked. Human Traffic follows their weekend from their point of view, the characters express their points of view and tell their stories to the camera, this really helps the viewer connect with the film and feel as though they are experiencing the weekend as well. I hope to be able to achieve this with our video. This will be hard as we will not be including any narrative, but I hope as the film follows getting ready through to the end of the night, the viewers of our film will feel as connected as is possible with a 4 minute film. Below I have included the films trailer. It is put to a soundtrack and this more closely reflects our video. The shot changes to the beat of the song and the tension and excitement is built from beginning to end. This film, its short edits and close camera angles have highly influenced how we will shoot and edit our film.
I really enjoyed making the video and I am extremely pleased with the end result. I feel the way it was edited fits perfectly the footage and our intensions of what the video would consist of and the ideas behind what we wanted to convey. Below is the final video.
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