Blog #12 Overview.

This blog is about the overview of the project, Surdus Mundi, and the progress that I have been discussing with my lecturer and my colleagues.

One took place on tinderbox, I highly recommended it because it has some lovely hot chocolate (yummy!) and the other was during the lecture. it was a weird week as the lecturer strikes were happening at the time.

So starting off with the tinderbox, the meeting was nearly 45 mins and I recorded the conversation. It was very interesting, starting off with the teaser which I needed clarifying, and because the normal definition of teaser is 15 to 45 seconds however the trailer is between 3-5 minutes, after the discussion happened, he explained that the trailer shows the mood tone and the idea of the short film, and the trailer is condensed version of the whole film into a short film.

For the April assignment, he was happy with the teaser that I created as it was a good place to start but it needed expanding as he thinks that he needs more of the “chat” the vocal side of the documentary meaning more sign language needs to be included in the video. And within the trailer it needs the little message of what the video is about. Which kinda makes sense as it would attract the audience.

The part of the conversations that stood out to me is that this project could easily turn into a big film or even become a series which I wasn’t expecting to be told. Which is lovely to hear, it is a possibility it could go this way, which would be fun to be honest.

As I explained about the deaf world and the differences, the frustrations, the culture. My lecturer was very intrigued about it as he thought that I should go deeper in the deaf world, because some of the things I told him about, his response to it was that it was a hidden world. Because he says that the culture is under threat, and he likes the idea of putting subtitles as the important part of the project, I did mention that there is a possibility of putting out two or three editions of this project, one with just subtitles no voice over, one with voice over and subtitles and lastly one with audio description. Which I may need help with, so possibly getting in contact with a company that I have got in touch in called collective text, who are a group of freelancers who make the videos more accessible, which could be a good place to start if I go down this path.

One of the things that he mentioned that I should try and do is film the deaf world but that would be quite difficult, because of two things. One of them is that they are comfortable being on camera, two sizes of the camera, not sure if a big camera would be suitable, but this is something that needs to be looked into which is important as it would make some progress toward the final piece.

But I have plans of involving more deaf people into the project, and hopefully will be a good contribution to the final piece which is good.

Next I will be talking about what happened in the lecture with my colleagues, each one of us showed our work and we discussed and tried to give feedback to the each person, so it was my turn to present what I have done so far, and showing the teaser, which only two of us only did which I am glad about because I am not the only one. And the feedback that I got from the others including my lecturer. It wasn’t a lot, but it mentioned authenticity, uniqueness and picking people more wisely. These stood out during the discussion on my project, the authenticity of the project and making it unique, so it would stand out to other projects that are made based on the theme or similar. And people are very important, if I choose the right people like I probably mentioned that it needs more gender balance because every story is different and unique, because they aren’t all the same story. But finding the right people will take time and fingers cross they say yes.

Anyway I don’t need to put my hopes up, but it will all come together in the end. I cannot wait to see the complete piece and I believe, i'm on target but one thing I need to do is keep going. I cannot wait!

God bless Oliver