Sunday, April 27, 2008

Week Fourteen: One Minute Film Concepts

So many projects and one minute film concepts have been covered in class so far that it is difficult to think up other projects that could be done. One suggestion I have is to just draw out other projects.

For instance, the found footage projects that we did for our last project could be broken down into two separate projects. One could be a culture jamming piece, either with specific subjects or subjects that the students have to come up with, and the other could be a recontextualization of having to pull two or more different things together to make a commentary on something else, sort of like myself and others did with cutting old movies/cartoons to old public service announcements. I think breaking it up into two separate projects would not only allow for more emphasis on found footage films and provide more time to look at said films, but I think it could also explain the ideas and differences between the two types more clearly than they were explained in our semester of class.

Another idea could be to have a random product/business/something of the sort be the subject of a one minute commercial. Many commercials on television today are really thirty second to one minute long stories about something going on that ends up involving the product in some way, shape, or form. You could come up with the story for the product to follow, or you could have students come up with the idea after you assign them the products, but I think it would be really interesting to see what students come up with, since so many of the commercials today are pretty “out there” ideas.

Even though animation was touched on in the first project of the semester, I think more emphasis on it would make the course a little more interesting. The only drawing on film that we did was for the first project, and the only animation we did was for one hundred frames within that project, so I think it would be interesting to maybe animate an entire one minute film over the course of the semester and have them air at the final screenings, kind of an accumulation of feelings, ideas, or something of the sort over the span of the entire course.

One idea that I think would be really interesting would be to have some sort of stock script, kind of like 201 used to have the stock storyline with the pie stealing. This could either be one minute of action, one minute of dialogue, or just a page description of something and they have to act it out within a minute, either within a one shot, continuous take like we did with the Bolex cameras, or they have to edit down what they have to one minute to make a coherent story within a one minute time period. Obviously, the story would have to be fairly concise, or each group could be given a page of a four to five page script, depending on how large the class is, and they have to film one minute of the film, and then all of the parts can be added together on screening day, and they can see how their entire five minute film turned out. That could be a really interesting way to make a 6x1 short film.

Overall, I think a lot of the projects that we have done this semester are kind of crucial to the idea of the class as a whole. We really touched all of the experimental film bases, in a way, with brief glimpses into all of the different categories that each project dealt with, and our range was so extensive that I am not really sure what else could be done.

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