In this week’s workshop, we were given a list of questions that we should be asking ourselves before we actually head out to shoot our interview projects for Project Brief 3, which happens to be the heat of the subject for most of us Media 1 students for the most of this week and the upcoming one too. As the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”. Can’t say I fully agree with that, but it definitely holds some strong values.

Here I go…

  1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ (Robert McKee) of your portrait?
    Ans: I was thinking of a working title for my Project Brief 3, and so far I’m going for “A Tongue to Speak”, and it is about this unofficial language that we use back home in Singapore, and everyone is so accustom to talking like that till it almost becomes like a dialect or an accent.
  2. How is your portrait film structured?
    Ans: I haven’t really thought of a formal structure for it yet, but for now it starts off as Q&A with onscreen texts for the question and I have my subject replying to them. Therefore it does not require the presence of an interviewer, although during the shoot, I took the role of the interviewer, but I found it complicated to have several shots of the interviewer and interviewee, cutting it, and with the constraints of having just 1 camera, it would have taken up a lot of time shooting and less time to edit.
  3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee?
    Ans: To convey some information and culture to my audience on the tongue that we speak back home, “Singlish”, and how it came about, how do we use it, and even from a cultural context on how it has evolved and came a long way to where it is today.
  4. How is your portrait being narrated?
    Ans: I don’t think there’ll be any narration for my portrait, I’ll just let my interviewee do most of the speaking with some visual aid through texts for certain questions that I might have prompted during the interview session with my subject. I opt not having any narration as I thought it would have seemed a little too documentary-like and it would also require having to record voice overs of myself which I am not too comfortable about, hence end up doing many takes which would be too time consuming.
  5. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait?
    Ans: I plan to use the element of music as a found footage,  just to create the mood and uplift the entire short film. Music definitely aids in creating a scene for the audience even before they are exposed to the visual aspect of the film. I once heard of this saying, “A picture paints a thousand words, but a song paints a thousand pictures”.
  6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point?
    Ans: Unfortunately, no, given the topic that I am conveying to my audience, I don’t see the need for a dramatic turning point. Probably the most dramatic moment of the film would be my subject moving away from home, but that’s as dramatic as it gets.
  7. When does this turning point in your portrait and why?
    Ans: It occurs midway through or maybe towards at the end where my subject reveals her identity and what she’s doing here in Melbourne.
  8. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum?
    Ans: It starts off with a simple Q&A and then we digress into speaking more about specific topics relating to Singapore food culture and the unofficial language we speak back home, “Singlish”.
  9. Where will your portrait’s dramatic tension come from?
    Ans: Just the tension of speaking a little more refined and articulate a little better when my subject is speaking with the locals here as compared to being back home where we can open the flood gates for “Singlish”.
  10. Does the portrait have a climax and/or resolution?
    Ans: Yes, I strongly believe there is a resolution, and that comes when my subject reveals more about herself instead of talking about the Singapore culture in general.