This week we had to submit our proposal’s for the semester’s big, final Project Brief in which the majority of the “method” of how we do it is up to us, this required a 1500+ word written proposal and a presentation in class in front of various important people from the Media section of RMIT. This blog post is a reflection on both my Written and Oral proposals as well as my general reflection on other peoples and my plans going forward for my Project.
I feel my written proposal was quite well done, for most of the break-week I was frankly stumped at what I was going to: I knew I wanted to make a film, but I needed to find a suitable excuse to make something I wanted to make. Luckily, late into the week I was hit with a burst of inspiration and decided to base my project around manipulating framerates and thier affects on audiances, and wrote what I feel to be a rather decent Project Proposal.
As a filmaker I am not a very subtle artist, and in the pricavy of this Blog litterally 1 person is going to read, I will admit that self consciousness issues mean that almost all my creative expression is almost a half parody of itself, as I dont have the guts to commit to something that isnt shielded from critism by cutesy or ironic shortcomings. This direct approach would be easy to demonstrate the requirments I have set, I can (and will) make a short film with wacky and unconventialonal uses of framerates, and this will be an easy starting point for my own disire to make
As for the Presentation portion of the assigment, that went less well……
I was woefully underprepared, and putting my idea into spoken words with minimal rehersal was tough. Following on from many mature and well thought out explorations of the frame I felt decidedly out of place and childish. My PowerPoint was an attrocity of visual design, and honestly I would have probably fared better without any text and just had the examples of videos/gifs (side note, the Framerate altering on Fury Road is much less prevelant on Youtube clips, on the Blu-Ray I could easily tell everytime it happened, on Youtube it took considerable effort to find an example that was easy to see, I dont know why this is).
Explaining my desire to film a super slow-mo, high FPS red goop filled balloon exploding as a mortal wound to a characters head was cringe inducing, and the 4 Judges seemed less than impressed, however a slight chuckle from Dan was reasurring, since he has read my Proposal and spent time with my in class, so he might have a better understanding of my intentions.
As for the rest of the Presentations I was very impressed, and almost all of the them put mine to shame. One in particular that stood out was Maggie’s, perhaps it was just the excellent production value of her Slideshow, but it was definetly the most memorable for me.
As for progress on my own project I have begun to formulate some key ideas of how I will use speed and framerate to enhance the stylistic elements of my short film and throughout the week I will continue to work on these and consult with Dan. Before (hopefully) begin filming next weekend when I have contanct with High School friends and wide open spaces, preferrablly involving a Balloon, red food dye, some chunks of pork and an array of iPhones set to Slow-Mo.