Intial Ideas

This year our class was allowed to have a practise preliminary task before we did the real thing. After making a video with my friends Hannah and Ren I decided to do it alone because I wanted to see if I could have ago at doing it my self, with all my own ideas. I decided to go alone for this one main reason being that I wanted to know if I could do it.
When approaching this task I tried to look for the more unconventional way I could fit the brief.
From the beginning I had decided that the video I would produce would not have any sound recorded by the camera but would still have dialogue, because the sound quality is not good on the camera. I still would have shot reverse shot to show conversation
I came up with two different concepts.
One being inspired by the film “Paris Je t’aime”, two mime artists find love by miming to each other. So I took this concept of two people falling in love by what they both do and created “Piano wo+man”. Were basically two characters who don’t know each other play the same song on different piano’s through their apartment walls and later on fall in love. That’s a basic over view, but after a while I decided to rule out this concept because it would take to long and I think it was taking the preliminary task too far.
So my second Idea was to make a comic book/superhero idea, I was inspired to do this from a music video (Santigold – I’m a lady) (skip to 2:10)



It isn’t a superhero in it but shows a guy jumping from the floor to the top of a building, which I thought looked quite cool and was good continuity. The brief said it wanted someone walking across a room and sitting down and having a discussion with someone. So as I said earlier I wanted to make it to the brief but I want it to be different from everyone else’s in the class. So I changed the room to walk across a roof, and changed it from sitting down having a conversation, to sit down and have an arm wrestle while having shot reverse shot for reactions and lip movements.

Once I decided it was going to be a superhero I started to think of friends I could use for it, an obvious friend sprung to mind who is 6’5”, this is were the inspiration for “The Adventures of Tall-Man!” came from. From this I got my smallest friend to be the super villain to show a good contrast. And like all good comic superheroes there has to be a Damsel in Distress to save, so I chose my friend Chloe.
Now I had my cast I needed to get some stills for the cover of this comic and a couple of pictures with the couple together. Here are some of the pictures I took:

I used Photoshop to create the comic book cover. I used the stills to be the main thing I worked around, I cut out the background added a blue sky because the day I took the pictures it was really gray. If you focus in the background I put some famous landmarks but In small so it emphasises his size. Also if you look closely Tallman has a very tiny cat in his hands, I did this to emphasise the fact how tall Tallman is, and also for comical values.
I used a conventional comic book font which I downloaded off www.dafont.com. I also made some labels for a bottle of Budweiser with my name on it, and a jar of marmalade that said “Directed by” which I would use at the beginning of my short. If I was to do this again I would defiantly make the labels on the Budweiser a lot better because they are quite badly done because they don’t fit over the letters, and I didn’t have enough time to carry on editing them before filming because it was an idea I had thought of just that morning, so they had to do.

When it came to the sound track I wanted it to be as authentic as it could possibly be, so I commissioned Tom Menary who is very good at music to help me make the main theme tune for it. I showed him what I wanted and he developed it and made it to what it is on the sound track. It’s very similar to the batman theme tune apart from it’s tall man!