Treatment

Treatment

Our piece is a three screen, short, installation film that will be about 1-2 minutes long and run on a loop. The aim of the piece is to deliver a statement about communication to a diverse audience. The piece will easily catch your eye as you walk past, and it shouldn’t be necessary to view the entire piece in order to understand the message that it’s trying to deliver. As our work is going to be displayed in a university, while our work will be for a large audience our primary viewership will be from students and university staff. With this in mind we knew that our piece would work best if it got a message across to people who just saw it in passing, on their way to a lesson or lecture.

To begin with our three screens will fade in from black to the white studio setting. The left hand screen will show a woman, the right hand screen will show a man, and the middle screen will show a birds eye view of a white table. The colour of our piece will be important, it needs to be kept simple so that it doesn’t distract too much from the theme, with a white background and black clothing it will keep the balance through the film.

Initially the woman will pick up a letter and put it in an envelope, and place it on the table in the middle. Then the man will send a text, which will appear on screen in the middle and say ‘not delivered’. The woman picks up a book and flicks through it, and places that on the table. The man flicks through some music on his phone and plugs in a speaker, then placing the iPod and speaker on the table. The woman then picks up a radio, places it in the middle and tries to tune it. The man then uses his phone again and tries to make call to the woman, which doesn’t go through. As he continues to try to call the woman, the call fails and her screen starts to flicker and disappears. Our soundscape fades to silence and his screen also fades to black. The main theme of our piece is about communication, but also looks at the idea of how older technologies are being used less and less, and newer things are coming into our lives that replace them. The piece aims to show that no matter how much we try to hold on to the past, eventually we have to move on.

Our soundscape will consist of subtle sound of the objects we have throughout the piece, each linking to the next. It will be a mix of downloaded and recorded sounds so that we have a wide range or different sources available to use.

Our lighting will be high key, and we will be using a variety of props. Items we will use will be things we already own so there will be no need to go out and purchase anything new. We will be using a letter, a phone (actors can use their own), a book, an iPod and speaker and a radio.

Our actors are two of my close friends who are really looking forward to helping our in a student film. They are both students themselves and have had some experience being in student work before. They are fairly flexible and are willing to do what is required of them for the shoot, and are going to provide their own clothes and mobile phones to use in the piece.

To film our piece we will need to take out three DSLR cameras and three tripods. Our plan on how to film is to set up the three cameras side by side and film the whole thing in one shot from three different angles – the left screen, the middle and the right. We consulted with a technician on whether this would work in post, if the footage would match up etc. We found out that as long as all of the settings - such as white balance - are the same, it should all look the same when we go to edit it later. Our middle screen is going to be looking down at the table as all of the items get placed on it, this way you would get a clear view of everything as it happens. We first of all planned on filming it all in one take but that might be a bit ambitious as it will be over a minute long and there are bound to be mistakes made, but we’ll see how it goes, if it looks like we can manage it on the day, we will attempt to film it all in one.