Brainstorming

This week in the experimental film module, my group and I met up to discuss ideas to finalise the premise of our film. As a group, we devised a 4 step plan of action as we moved more towards the idea of solely focusing on the frustrating images over that of subcultures specifically, what annoys us as a collective. The reaction we wanted to evoke through the film was a sense of confusion and annoyance from the audience by what they had been forced to watch.

To still fit in the idea of our generation in the first step of our plan we were going to use clips we had filmed on our camcorders depicting our daily life. Mariam, Lillie and I had tested this out at an event we went to, to see if the camcorder footage would work. However, most of it was incoherent and lacked direction so we needed to despite what the motive of it was going forward.

The second step was compiling a list of annoying images:

• The shaving of a head but missing a patch of hair

• Someone mowing the lawn and intentionally missing a patch of grass

• A long black space in the film - to irritate people's attention spans

• A band set up with a saxophonist playing a solo as the rest of the band are about to play the film cuts

• Someone colouring in the lines but then goes outside

• Someone biting into the middle of a Kit-Kat

• Someone discussing an elaborate story which keeps getting interrupted so you never hear the full conversation

• Ice cream dripping down a hand

• A bad domino set up

• Changing the format of the film e.g the aspect ratio, the camera type

• Penny pushers

• Cutting before the perfect bowling strike

• Mis -spelt subtitles

• Incongruent dialogue

• An informative video with all the information missing

The third step moving forward with these ideas we thought about getting an emotional response from an audience of our peers for example at the Secret Cinema meetings. So then we could see what clips worked or were more frustrating than others.

Then in the fourth step, we were to conduct interviews where we would present the interviewee with a nostalgic object such as a Tamagotchi and ask them questions while something weird was in front of them such as a desk covered in soil. And therefore frustrate them by ignoring the elephant in the room being the soil on the desk. Of course, moving forward we would have to consider the ethical issues of intentionally winding someone up.

Inspired by the first two steps of the plan as one of the editors in the group, I began to look through archives and personal archive to create a short edit of what the basic structure of the film could be going forward.

https://vimeo.com/395696686

When showing this montage to other people the part which stood out the most was the long black video where the majority of the people presumed the video had stopped working or had frozen. According to a 2018 study by Microsoft, the average human being as of now has an attention span of 8 seconds. So being in a cinema environment when the film is shown and forcing people to watch 30 seconds of nothing visually stimulating is bound to frustrate.