Video Journalist Exegesis

Video Project Exegesis for Video Journalist Project

By Daniel Morrison and Julia Hughes-Smallwood

We chose the video journalist option. Our mockumentary was based around the idea of a disaster.

Story Outline:

Our film follows the story of a brother and sister set in modern day Australia, who are caught in the middle of an attack, they are forced to flee their home and seek help. The film is in three parts:

1)   Initial attack – the brother and sister fleeing their home at night after the attack has erupted.

2)   Wandering the streets, seeking help – they are trying to figure out what’s going on, and become confused as there is no one around. They get the idea of heading to the airport as they can still hear the planes passing overhead.

3)   Their demise – they have just hidden themselves after being discovered. They’re unsure as to what has found them, they run to seek further cover after hearing a frightening noise. The brother attempts to find out what has found them, he is killed in the process. The sister discovers his body and attempts to escape what has found them and is murdered.

Research and Inspiration:

We researched films that used hand held technique in their cinematography. The film that most related to our concept was Cloverfield (2008) which we drew most of our inspiration from. We realised through research, due to non-traditional camera techniques a lot of the experience came from the sound of the films. This drew our focus on creating an interesting soundscape for the film.

We chose locations that are based on the fact that they were secluded. In order to have less background noise so that we could create our own atmosphere. The first location we chose a suburban area as we believed it was a strong starting point for the film, as the attack occurring is forcing this brother and sister from their home and creating a sense of panic in a usually calm area.

The second location, we chose a street in quiet suburban area, and we chose the day to film to be in clean-up week and bin day. Our reasoning for choosing this time and place was due to the fact that the street was in an unkempt manner. We felt this look depicted the aftermath of the previous scene, being the attack in the suburban area. The overturned bins and rubbish on the street conveyed the urgency of the events the night before and created a sense of isolation for the brother and sister, as the street is still in the state that it is, it suggests that there is no one around to fix the street.

The third location we chose was the exterior of an abandoned tram shed, the area had a derelict appearance and had a mix of nature and industrial aesthetics. We felt that this area further reinforced the idea of isolation from civilisation, as they are placed in a space that is in ruins and forgotten. We chose this place for their deaths as their bodies would be left among the forgotten debris of society.

Challenges Faced:

The major hurdles we came across during our development process was the digitizing of footage, which affected our choices on effects. We also came across sound difficulties as some choices of sound did not give the desired effect we intended.

We spent a few sessions trying to digitize the footage, we encountered several difficulties with the software hindering our editing process. After our footage was not working in the software, we then had further problems attempting to convert our footage to a workable format. Once we finally got the footage to appear in a software program the footage was boxed in, but it was the best outcome we had so far and worked with what we had. This then became difficult when applying effects to the footage as the effects were applied outside of the main frame of the footage. This limited our choices when choosing effects that were appropriate to the scenes.

Our next difficulties were with sound, we had difficulties with achieving consistent sound levels. Some sounds did not give the desired affect that we had intended for them. For example an explosion in the first scene did not have the magnitude we thought it could achieve. We had success with our microtrack recordings on the days of shooting, we encountered trouble only with the sounds we were outsourcing from open source websites.