Mainly inspired by the video ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’.
Really loved the way the videos flows so naturally even though it lacks an inherent narrative. The visuals and movement were good enough to keep me engaged with the film.
Wanted to focus on composition and motion in this entire project.
I want to utilize a general idea/word that people are familiar with and use video footage to convey the idea. In a sense I want to portray an idea present in modern day society.
My 3 ideas will all revolve around this same concept, differing only in subject matter.
Indra’s Net
Indra’s Net is a vast net that covers all existence, putting the net together are countless jewels. Each jewel reflects the light of all the other jewels in the net.
The idea of a ‘net’ is something i would like to explore. How it is present in our modern day and how a ‘net’ will affect our lives.
Below are a few ideas that i want to portray with the idea of a ‘net’:
- The internet connecting people together.
- Fishing net to provide sustenance (catching fishes)
- Cleaning nets to ensure survival. (clean water)
- People ‘packing’ together like fishes in a net.
- Things that have the shape of the net. ‘shape of windows in skyscrapers, spider webs’.
- Many more for me to explore.
In all, by using visual and movement, I hope to portray the idea of ‘net’ in our society.
What kind of subject should i zoom in at? Please do advise. 🙂
Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s Box contained all the evil on earth, which was unleashed on earth. However, something was left in the box, it was hope.
This idea inspired the previous idea. It falls in second place because of the difficulty in catching ‘evil’ in film.
However, the idea can be ‘deeper’ and more relatable as compared to the other one.
Same thing. What kind of subject should i look into?
Labyrinth
Lost. In modern day Singapore. Wanted to capture the endless maze within the urban jungle.
I hope to also capture the multitude of choices that people make in general (what to order for lunch, what clothes to buy and what career choices to make.
Advice, advice!
Out of the 3 ideas, which one should I choose? Then how can I develop on the idea? Appreciate all your advice. Thank You! 🙂
Have a great day,
KJ
Heya! Obviously you have a very strong idea about what kind of structure you want your final product to be. I think what makes your few ideas all similar (and thus hard to choose between) is the fact that right now all of them are simply visuals. I understand you based it off “The Man with a Movie Camera”, and I agree the film works, but why it does is because this was made at a time where the movie camera was still a novelty, and thus the “simple” exploration of various techniques possible with a movie camera and simple documenting of everyday life made it a “good” film. Why it is still good to us now is because it gives us a glimpse into the past. However, I think you might need to develop your concepts past the visual documenting to make it more interesting/meaningful to the current day viewer (unless you’re making a time capsule for the future haha).
So possible a way of doing this is to think about the content and also the editing of your footage. Can viewers infer meaning from the sequencing and juxtaposition of these images? Maybe you could also add in music that adds a whole new dimension to watching all this images? For e.g. I knew someone who was thinking about editing the NDP song “Home” with footage of the bad things that happened in Singapore to have that irony.
If you consider these factors for each of your ideas, maybe you will be more invested in one of them and thus you could choose that one to develop further. Okay I’ve wrote a whole lot and I’m not sure if any of that was useful. Hopefully it is ^_^ll All the best!
Hello! I really love all your ideas though I personally like Indra’s Net and Pandora’s Box better haha. Indra’s net is definitely an interesting concept and I love the way you’re linking the various aspects of modern life. For this idea, composition and the transitions you use will be important. The net in each scene could be the focus of the panel as you transition into the next shot. I think you can make something really fluid here. Like what Shannen mentioned, concept is very important because that’s the basis of Indra’s net. Given the way you described the gem and even the concept of net, I totally see this as an animation as well. It could work and you could explore the transitions.
For pandora’s box, again, possibly harder to portray in film given a poor art student’s resources, but I do see it as an animation. I just think it’s a possibility, especially with pandora’s box. You could represent darkness any way you like and this would be one of the more abstract animations. You can explore form and shape and things like that. Though if you’re more interested in making this a film, I suggest using a narrative frame to help you express the concept. So there’s no physical box and maybe you can have the story set in the modern world where the darkness has already been released and show glimpses of modern vices to represent the darkness. So the pandora’s box is represented by a single man/woman’s struggles. So in a flashback perhaps there could be an event that caused agony or changed the main character’s life for the worse which represents the opening of the box and in the end you could show a couple of good things in the modern world that represent the hope that we tend to have that things will get better. Of course, no obligation at all to follow any of this, but I do hope anything I’ve said is useful enough to help you figure out what you want to do!