Zach's Blonde Moment

08 IM1 Concept Finalization – The Pursuit of Happiness

Yesterday we had our film shoot for my groups Integrated Media 1 project, which went extremely well. Before I get into the film shoot itself, I wanted to make a blog post about our groups concept and how we were going to approach filming the videos before I make a blog post about the shoot itself. But for a little bit of a teaser, here is a screen capture from the shoot below:

Before I go into discussing our concept, I want you to read down this list of words and read each one aloud:

Suicidal

Depressed

Sad

Sorrow

Hysterical

Furious

Rage

Angry

Hate

Grumpy

Disgust

Hurt

Scared

Torment

Suffering

Agony

Anguish

Despair

Gloom

Guilt

Shame

Regret

Hopelessness

Lonely

Insecurity

Embarrassment

Pity

Jealousy

Envy

Anxious

Flushed

Stressed

Frustration

Annoyed

Irritation

Confused

Nervousness

Sympathy

Exhausted

Tired

Trust

Relief

Curious

Contemplative

Shocked

Surprised

Satisfaction

Playful

Pride

Amusement

Lust

Contentment

Affection

Adoration

Love

Excited

Ecstasy

Euphoria

Enthrallment

Happy

Did you see a pattern develop among these words?

During out assessment for our individual sketch films, Adrian kept bringing up the idea of “patterns” and how we as humans automatically recognize and relate to patterns wherever we go. This is something that he said we need to have in our K-films- a pattern, which is something our group is going to create with the concept of our project! We have gone with a concept, which circles around videos that represent different types of emotions. These emotions will be communicated through an actor who expresses these emotions, then from this- the emotions will be grouped together (Eg. Happy with Enthrallment and Sad with Depressed etc.), which will form our film’s structure! The “patterns” that Adrian had wanted will be formed through the videos being of the same actor behind the same backdrop who is framed and lit the same way for every single video. From this, the viewer will not be distracted by anything else that is going on apart from the emotion that is expressed, therefore then there is focus placed on this one aspect of each video, it will be easy for them to recognize relationships that are developed with the videos that are linked to it, hence- patterns are formed!

Our initial idea for connected the clips (in an overall sense), was to have the sadder, more depressing emotions to be displayed first and then have the viewer click his or her way through (yet be directed a little based on how we structure our keywords) and direct themselves to the happier emotions, and therefore “Finding or Discovering Happiness”. However, recently we have discussed playing with different concepts that circle around the idea of connecting different emotions and we have come up with the conclusion of trying different things when we begin to connect the videos and seeing what ideas work better than others. For example, starting the film at the happier stuff and letting them go through to the darker side, starting them at a random video in the K-Film and letting the viewer click through to “find happiness” with the risk of clicking on the wrong emotions and accidentally leading themselves to the darker emotions (This one could be interesting actually- make it into a kind of game!). We also toyed with the idea of making the darker emotions black and white and slowly seeping colour back into the clips as the emotions progress to the happier stuff, which will create an interesting effect. The problem with this, however, is that as the viewer gets into the film more, we may see clips that are in almost full black and white up against clips that are almost full colour, which could make things look messy. If we stick to one saturation of colour, then it will (like I said before) force the viewer to concentrate only on the emotion and not become distracted by any other aspect of the film.

The only thing that is really left to do is work out what the hell we are going to do for the thumbnails! Well, I suppose we have a while to work it out!