DINNER PARTY

We planned a dinner which we thought would engage and provoke interesting discourse. The line up was Me, Joe, rich and James. No girls allowed, like some kind of boy's tree house club. The idea was to have an engaging dinner at ours, over which we would have a series of humorous conversations challenging the boundaries of pretentiousness. The whole thing would be edited to have a very satirical tongue in cheek overtone using the aid of a 'diary room' cam as a tool to inject further laughs into what we were talking about. Everyone would be; not acting, but 'over vamping' their personalities in order to clash and disagree upon issues. We would use a kind of fly on the wall 'office' style of filming cut in and out of funny interviews when relevant to the conversation next door to add comic effect and emphasise points. We would aim to capture some really nice little awkward moments and glances between conversation to create a very funny subtext to the night even if it was not the night. Basically we wanted to make it very subtlety funny and british, kind of like a better version of come dine with me - meets the office.

Or that was the plan.

We organised it for one night and only Rich turned up, then again the following night and no-one turned up. After that it never really happened. So we decided to just make it anyway, albeit much shorter and missing the point of an interesting conversation slightly, and focused on what we thought was a funny subject of mine and Joe's questionably homosexual relationship. There seemed to already be this feeling in the air that we might be so we just thought it'd be funny to subtly push it in film. The night we were filming was actually the night that no one turned up although we thought they would. So all the footage was of us nervously cooking and tentitively looking at the clock waiting for our guests to arrive, as if it was something we had worked really hard on and took very seriously as hosts, awkwardly trying to explain to a camera crew why no one was turning up. It became more about capturing a depressing realisation that our friends didn't want to come round, the tension between the two of us and ultimately just salvaging the night to just enjoy it for ourselves and he gay connotations which ensued. We always wanted to make it funny because a lot of our ideas and common ground is based on humour. We seem to share a very exclusive sense of humour founded on a love of awkwardness, in-jokes and character roles, so our collaborative projects always have a lot of humour behind them I've found. I'ts a shame that the original project never materialised though because we had a very specific idea of what we wanted and I think it was going to be very strong. But at least we did something..