Being Different

At Uni, for a module coursework, we had to create a documentary respecting the british "Channel 4" guidelines. I decided to do a Mockumentary cause I think it gives you more ways to play around.

Here it is the video:


Often people is curious (like I do) about the creative process behind an idea.
From the creation to the final wrap, that is what I've done:

Being different

The Idea
The starting point was since the beginning the song from Sam Mendes' "American Beauty": "Dead Already" composed by Thomas Newman. I like the tempo of the song and the way it sounds, than the character just pop up in my mind: a different guy with a different childhood spent reading book instead of watching television. The question is: how can he be different?

Creating a Character
I thought that the best way to made Andy Bloom character up was thinking right from the beginning about the few sentences I needed for the 3 minutes joint.
Consistency, attractiveness, sense of rhythm and briefness, those were four of the most important elements I kept in mind while I was writing down the lines.
Andy Bloom's world must be believable and understandable in only 3 minutes.
I built the character keeping in mind the actor that was going to interpret him.

The Actors
To reach a good result without professional actors, the most important thing was them to feel comfortable about the things they needed to say keeping words as much real as possible. Andy, Gen and Dean are friends for real and Eileen is in fact Andy's girlfriend, so for them, they where talking about real people in a real world. Than I asked them to think about the weirdest person they ever known and relate him with the concept they needed to explain in few sentences. I knew since the beginning that give the actors lines to follow couldn't really work, the only way to reach a good result was to explain them the concept, relate it to their real world and wait for the answers to the questions I made for them. It worked.

The Locations
Choosing the locations was the easier part, in the flat I live there are big rooms with big windows and my characters didn't need anything fancy. I was lucky cause my flatmates have very particular things in their rooms so that the talking heads have a much more interesting environment that surrounds them.

Camera, Mic and stuff
I've shoot in SD (PAL, Wide) with an amateur Sony HD camera combined with a Marantz recorder and a shotgun mic. I've used natural light, shooting between 12am to 5pm. The locations are all in my flat. I've played a bit with the exposure, the focus and the white balance, all obviously set on manual. The audio tracks has been recorded on Wav 44.1k on mono and fixed with ProTools and Adobe Soundbooth. The mockumentary has been edited with Adobe Premiere Pro, the opening titles has been created with Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. The post-production took about a week to be completed.

Editing Style
The product I had in mind had to be entertaining above all. I wanted to have a gentle jump from a cut to another. After I shoot the talking head interview for Andy Bloom I decided to drop the video and keep the audio cause the light wasn't good enough and so I've used pictures with a sort of Kevin Burns. The opening titles are a mix of camera movements and animated letters, I've used After Effects with a massive number of keyframes to reach a good result. I did it that way to underline Andy's speech cause I think is the most representative for his character.
Images and music are not necessarily following the same rhythm and the edited cuts are following more the words than the music.