Blog 7

Just completed my final edit of my film, clocking in at around 3 minutes and 30 seconds including credits. I know it's only a pilot but I figure the suggestions from first year still apply regarding acknowledging the university on web-available material, since we used UWE equipment. Plus I wanted to provide a complete list of clips and additions.

In a shift from my original idea I ditched the voiceover last night both because it felt lazy and pretentious. The original text was some variation of the following-

"Watching for something. For an escape. For Ideas. Am I passive or active? Do I engage or am I absorbed? Am I copying others or building something of my own? Am I looking for inspiration or oblivion?"

When creating these sorts of projects I always think about how the concept will play at the end of year show and frankly, even though the exploration of ideas with traditionally low-cultural value material is my aim, the distance for the audience between high-minded preaching and the down and dirty of the concept was too much. I'm also mindful of the 'show don't tell' principle, and with a VO I'm just explaining the idea instead of letting people explore it. Instead I assembled a series of audio clips from various shows to establish the theme of blankly watching without seeming to react. I took shows that represent a variety of material and edited it in as though channel-surfing, and in that way Hot Fuzz is just another thing stage in the theme. One important aspect in choosing the extra shows was how they reference other TV. The SNL segment is a fake live news report, Larry Sanders is a show about a TV chat show etc. There's other aspects mixed in for flavour, like Japanese anime (that culture is an aspect we'll revisit in B&BH) and Homeland, a show that uses a mix of real and produced audio and footage in it's opening titles. Black Mirror is a sci-fi drama about a talent show, so I took a segment of the performance from that to both represent and have an implied critique of the talent genre for those that spot the reference. UFC added a live sports production and How I Met Your Mother traditional sitcom, just to try and generate an even sample and realistic variation of material (any montage of modern television would represent those genres somewhere).

In the end I feel my pilot represents a great deal of thought and ideas but perhaps has an issue  emphasizing it's point with it's short running time and perhaps choices I made in the media. The recognition of the characters used tends to override any point I'm trying to make so far, it may be beneficial to use a wider range of less iconic characters in the final result, perhaps finding clips to do the exposition for me indirectly.