Week 11 was an eventful week, full of pre-planning and organising, leading up to one of my final assessments of the semester (my second final semester too ah!). Prior to all the planning of my individual and group video, I helped out with Liv’s video piece as the sound recordist. Helping out Liv gave me an idea of how it would be like working together as group. At the same time, it made me realise how stressful it can get filming in a busy environment, especially if you are filming in a public space. Nonetheless, we still managed to achieve and get through all the shots as planned!
Taken on set during Liv’s video piece production
Organising two types of video pieces is a difficult task to get around, especially if you are working as a group. The difficulties that arise are usually the level of commitment between group members, clashes of schedules and the creative differences.
During Week 11, we had the opportunity to venture and discuss between peers what it was we wanted to achieve for this final project. Everyone had a vague idea about what it was we wanted to do so it was quite hard to set our sights on a particular video idea. However, there was this one profound moment during the discussion between my potential film partners – this was in regards to choosing which observation we were going to adapt. Neville brought up a couple of my observations, stating his interest in them and I was quite taken aback (in a good way) because I did not think that anyone would care to stop and read my observations of the world. This observation, in particular, was about meeting a friend I speak to online more so than real life. To my surprise, a lot of people seemed to agree with this idea and also had their own interpretations of what this observation meant for them. For example, Neville perceived as a story with two points of views and then eventually, these points of views would merge and become one. On the other hand, Jack thought that the whole scene was based off the awkward interaction between this person and the observation. As it is my own observation, it was definitely about the awkwardness but that was not the main reason – it was about my perception of this person’s online and offline persona and the differences between them.
In the end, we veered towards the idea of going for the ‘awkwardness’ between these two characters, mainly because it has the potential to be entertaining on screen and also, everyone seemed to gravitate more towards that idea. During pre-production, I wrote a script and we all worked on a storyboard in order to get the final idea of this video. It was fairly simple, with very little dialogue and heavily reliant on the voice-over to convey the awkwardness.
This storyboard was helpful in constructing how the shots would look like and how we could enhance the ‘awkwardness’ between these two characters. I’m glad that everyone seems to have the same vision for this project which is effective for teamwork, especially when working with tight deadlines. I’m looking forward during production with my group and I’m excited to see how far all of our combined skills can take us!