30 SEC FILM ON BEAUTY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN.
I began this project having a very clear idea that I wanted to focus more on the aspect of Responsibility in design and using that to inform the beauty or at least having the two themes on parallel importance in my concept. I didn't want to exhibit a shallow portrayal of beauty. I thought one of the best ways to do this was to look at the bigger picture and exclude human beauty from the subject. In fact in this project human interaction all together was shown as mostly a bad thing which detracts from the beauty of the film.
After some thinking and working out of ideas I decided i would concentrate on mans impact on natural environmental beauty. I wanted it to be broad as a theme but needed a subject which would adequately capture the imaginations of the viewer and decided to follow a herd of deer at sunrise. I thought they would act as a visual vehicle to explain the importance of the subject to the viewer. Below are some pages from my sketchbook of the thought process which helped me arrive at this conclusion:
(I apologize that some would not rotate..)
In my film the role of man is solely within the category of responsibility. This can be broken up into two parts:
His duty to create responsible design ( in the case of designing responsible city growth and its impact on the surrounding environment)
His duty to create responsible design ( in the case of making this short film to raise awareness and promote the main theme)
Thus I hoped I would not design a shallow piece of work rather an important and beautiful one.
I don't think I wholly succeeded in this task, finding the restrictions of a 30 second brief painful to cut out great bits of film and form a coherent narrative which actively gives the message over. However for one of my first attempts at film making I feel it was a part success. I gained confidence with the technical side of film making as well as the planning and rigid structure required to make such a short piece of informative work.
Below are some story-boarding pages from my book:
So with an idea mapped out of how I would translate what I wanted to say into a beautiful short video which would get over the the concept as well, I set out to film. This required cycling at 3am/4am across london to sw15 (richmond park) where I would be finding and shooting the herd of deer in time to set up for the roughly 5am sunrise. I have gone into the hows and whys of continuity and how I shot the film in my book writing so I wont repeat that but I didn't get all the shots I needed on the first trip so had to make a second one later that week. It was a laborious process but a worthwhile one I felt because some of the shots and lighting were so nice.
The soundtrack I wrote myself on a computer programme. I wanted it to compliment the aesthetic of the visuals but not overshadow or distract from them. Therefore I composed this very abstract synthetic harmony to sit over the top of the film.
Hopefully the brief of the film has been met adequately: a 30 second film about the responsibility of beauty and design, shown through the format of a beautiful short film.
