As part of our work for our module, we had to produce a media object that had elements of all of the key concepts we had been taught in our lectures and seminars.
When the challenge was announced, i met up with the rest of my group to discuss what ideas we could come up with under the task title of ’Something I Have Always Wanted To Make…’. It was quite difficult to come up with an idea, not only because it gave us such a broad range, but because it seemed almost impossible to think of an original idea. The group decided that we wanted to do something different from what every other group were likely to do e.g. adverts about alcoholism, drug taking, discrimination etc. This meant that on top of the fact that we needed an original idea based on a broad subject title, we has also now decided to do something which was completely out of the ordinary.
For a little while we sat in silence, musing over the possibilities. Several suggestions were thrown into the discussion such as advertising an emotion such as ‘happiness’. This was dismissed because it was felt it was too basic an idea and that it would be difficult to produce. Another idea which was given was to do a short film based around the slogan ‘life’s too short’, but again this idea was dismissed because it may have been too easy to go down the drink, drugs, discrimination route.
An interesting idea which was thrown into the mix was to present a blank piece of paper or a blank screen. This was to represent the fact that advertisements don’t actually advertise anything and that you may as well have a blank screen in front of you with just the brand name at the bottom. This idea, although popular with many members of the group, was dismissed because we felt it was too complicated and it would need an explanation after it was shown, something which was not possible for us to do due to time constraints on the day we were to show the media products.
We decided to follow on from the idea that advertisements don’t actually sell anything and develop it to a more manageable clip which could be shown to the audience. Following the same path, it was suggested that the media influences what we buy, what we wear and how we lead our lives, prompting the slogan, ‘Does what you own, end up owning you?’. We followed this idea through thinking of how it could be produced into a mini-film or advert.
The idea of a girl being swallowed up by magazines didn’t take long to establish and once we had worked out what we were going to do, we had to see if it was viable and makable. It was decided that we would do stock frame animation because we couldn’t physically make the paper swallow a person and stock frame animation allowed us to incinuate that that was what was happening.
It was also easy to make equipment wise, as all we would need was a digital camera and basic computer software (Windows Movie Maker). With our idea in place, we set about picking up various flyers and magazine articles to form the ‘swallowing’ objects. We also decided that we would need a tripod in order to keep the camera steady and to ensure that the pictures ran in sync with each other and there were no jerky movements.
We all went our separate ways with the view that we would meet in the Ellen Terry building at 11 o’clock the following day to hire the tripod from the media loan shop and to start filming our project.
The following day, we met in the Ellen Terry common room and then stood in line, waiting patiently for the queue to move. We decided that we didn’t need the tripod and so went to start filming but the members of the group who are media production students strongly suggested that we use one in order to make it look more professional. We split the group in half so that three people went to the set of out production (a group members house) and the other three stayed in line for the tripod. It turned out that when we got to the front of the line, the tripods had all been booked out so we all met at the set to start the filming.
Whilst the other members of the group set up the back-drop for our sequence, Shaun and I sat and listened to the possible background music for the film. This was quite difficult because the music didn’t always fit with the mood of the message we were trying to portray.
Once the back-drop was completed and Charlotte had painted her face white, we were ready to start filming. Throughout the filming process we had to constantly make new pieces of media to screw up and place around Charlotte to create the illusion of her being swallowed. The whole process of filming, from start to finish, took around an hour and a half , however, it probably would have been longer but Charlotte got too hot and too dehydrated under the paper and fainted. We therefore took the decision to stop filming as we were happy with the shots we had and we didn’t want to put Charlotte in any danger.
Once we had uploaded all of the pictures, it was fairly easy to create the film on Window Movie Maker and we only needed to add music and sound effects.
Overall , i feel that we worked really well as a team and although there were disagreements at the start of the process, once the idea had been picked, we were all very focused on achieving the same goal. The film itself maybe wasn’t of the best of standards and in my opinion could of been a bit longer, but i was not willing to carry on filming after Charlotte had almost passed out, as were the rest of the group. I think that the concept we had was different to any of the others and that it got a message across to our audience, which is ultimately what we wanted to achieve.
