melancholy
My final major project of my UAL Extended Diploma in Creative Media Film and TV pathway, I chose to visualise depression. The main reason I chose this topic is because it interests me the most as I have my personal struggles with it, and also I feel like it needs to be spoken about more and destigmatized in teenagers. Because of my knowledge on this topic, it further emphasizes the emotions portrayed in the short film. I want people to become more comfortable talking about this topic, and how it affects nearly everyone in different ways. Throughout my short film It’s sort of daily life for me, and many other people, from the start of the day till the end, and how depression effects people’s everyday lives, from feeling numb to having no motivation, and also having suicidal thoughts quite often. But I wanted my film to have a positive side at the end, which is my dad coming to sit next to me for support, meaning not all stories like this have a bad ending.
Linked below is my old website I created showing the process of how I made this film
a self portrait - piece to camera
Overall, I enjoyed this project, producing artistic pieces of work benefits me as it’s the type of work I enjoy creating, as I stated in the video, and can display all my creative skills in a video, by using different shot types and techniques, an example is the shot of my eye in focus with the background blurred using depth of field. I took inspiration from multiple video self-portraits on YouTube as they really stood out to me. They included multiple shots with a voiceover while talking about themselves, including old footage of themselves and different artistic shots of things that might not correlate to what they’re talking about.
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Upon reflecting on my first finished draft and other feedback, I have gone back and added more shots that I filmed instead of archival footage from some of my previous work, as it would demonstrate my skills with a camera.
Personally, I don’t like being in front of the camera, which is why I used more archival footage, but I’ve realised it doesn’t have to be archival footage or me and can just be creative shots. It would further add to the artistic values to what a video self portrait is. I don’t necessarily need to add the shots that correlate to my voiceover, but I’d rather add creative shots using different techniques.
Skateboarding (documentary)
My short documentary project is about why skateboarding is viewed as anti-social behaviour, and what needs to be done to change people’s views.
I chose this as it’s something that isn’t spoke about much, but effects the skating community massively, it’s an issue that needs to be raised to prove skateboarding doesn’t cause anti-social behaviour. I used voiceovers, which I recorded in college from a script I had written, interviews which I had recorded over a week including my friends, and archival footage from a YouTube channel which I had permission to use from.
I tried to make my video as professional as I could, by doing lots of research on other short documentaries about skateboarding, the one I took inspiration from the most was VICE's 'Skate World: England' on YouTube. As this was filmed in England and about England's skate culture, it helped me visualise what I wanted to create.
covid - 19
The idea for my final major project (2020) came after going back to college in March after both lockdowns, it inspired me to describe visually what has happened in the past year and how it's impacted all of us. It’s a short film/ documentary on the realities of Covid and how it affected the general public and how it will make us think in the future.
I wanted to create something hard-hitting but also visually pleasing and informational. Creating this short film has been very beneficial for me as a film student as I’ve gained more experience and knowledge, also realising what my strengths and weaknesses are, not necessarily in camera work, but planning and gathering ideas then putting them all together.
home
This short film is about my feelings on the idea of 'home'. My plan was to treat it more like a documentary/ non-fiction as I want it to be as real as possible, and show as many emotions and feelings as possible, and use different locations and shots to show how other people view home as well as me, since Covid as it has impacted a lot of things.
Also on how I view home recently or in general, as a boring and empty place but somewhere I feel the safest. My main priority is that everyone understands what message I’m trying to get across, by using different composition techniques along with other things, and my knowledge of this.