8. Running With It

Well, with bated breath, it appears we have settled upon a video idea we'd like to take further! This idea being the concept video I suggested for The Strokes - Last Night

Jake and I were talking about it in media this morning shortly after (and to be honest a bit during heh) Mrs. B had spoken about Alex Busson's group filming their production early. I personally felt we should run with the Strokes idea because: 1. It's something different. 2. It's challenging and 3. I feel we can really tie it into the genre of indie videos (while still not being a crappy bog-standard MTV2 indie video) through the use of good mise-en-scene. Me being the elitist perfectionist that I am, this sort of stuff appeals to me!

Mise-en-scene is something that Jake picked up on as well. He suggested that we really go for the mise-en-scene aspect of our production (always thinking of the final mark that boy is :P). Partly inspired by Michel Gondry he suggested that, instead of just using a cafe/diner we create our own set. While a bit hesitant at first, I came to see his point, going on to suggest that we look into using my local (Woolpit) village hall as the place where we could construct our mock-up cafe.

This particular village hall is a huge place, with a kitchen style place (which I have visions of using in an opening dolly shot, moving left until we reach our central character sitting directly opposite the table) to the left of an open-plan entrance corridor, which would be good to use as something behind the central character's head. We could set up tables, chairs and other cafe style things in there easily. As well as this the hall is home to a stage, so it has pretty advanced lighting in there (whether we could use this is as yet undetermined).

Back to the idea of the set, I want to create a similar feel to the bar in Fight Club or the diner/bar in Goodfellas where they kill the 'Made-man', that gritty, other-worldy feel; mainly because I feel this will really fit with the whole "indie video" style we want. This could quite possibly be achieved through lighting and good mise-en-scene, so it's something I'll look into further.

A feature that I want to use is focus, something that is greatly underused in school produtions (mainly because of the equipment, more on how to overcome this later). I feel this would really fit into the "morning-after-the-night-before" thing I want in the video. I think utilising the focus of a camera will work on many different levels for us. One way being having our main character in focus with behind him in soft focus; this will make the people moving around in slow motion seem all the cooler to the audience. Another level I feel this would work on would be from having the camera going into a quite hard focus on our main character or other areas of the frame.

All of this focus thing goes back to my major inspiration for the video: sitting in a cafe in Bury St. Edmunds after a long night. This is a weird thing I think only I experience, but after a long night with friends, I always get a heightened sense of awareness of what's going on around me (not a hangover), with everything in focus, as well as a sense of me being more relaxed than everyone else in the world rushing about (this would probably be down to being tired and being a lazy teenager with not much to do on a Saturday morning). It's partly this that I want to convey through clever use of focus and slow/fast motion.

Right, before I move onto the next bit, I'll explain how (I really, really, really hope) we can utilise focus in our video: we'll hopefully be able to use Jake's dad's pretty decent (understatement) camera. Jake'll have to do a bit of hands-and-knees begging, but if we could use it, the results would be fantastic (again, I hope).

Anyway, the next bit I'd like to cover is shots, and how they might change. On this topic Jake wants to include a "cliché-but-not-cliché" indie-style walking into the distance shot. He also thinks (as covered in an earlier post) that one single continuous P.O.V. shot could get boring. On the former I agree, on the latter I don't. I feel that a walking away shot would nicely bookend the video (couple with the opening dolly shot that I described earlier). However I feel that the idea of a continuous P.O.V. shot is all part of the dynamic of the video, and it's something that appeals to me greatly, it'd be a challenge but I think we can maintain an interest (a partly shaken up can of coke expolding in fast motion whilst its owner is in normal-time would look awesome in my opinion).

So that's pretty much where we are. We're going to be doing a test-session pretty soon to see how good the lip-synch will be (another difficult aspect of the video), and maybe some storyboards. So there you go!

Sibley