Since around this time last week, I, as well as the other guys on the media production course, have been thinking about the Cross Media Platform course. I approached it with slight anticipation as to what the group I was with was going to do as a couple of people had mentioned puppets would be somehow involved. I had ideas of it being similar to Avenue Q or the ending of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Attended the first meeting a little bit late and discussion was underway already regarding ideas. The idea floating was mythical creatures that have been locked away in a government security based. All the characters were puppets of course. This idea then started to evolve and morph and moved in to different areas. It moved in to a group of mythical creatures who are under house arrest but could move about freely in the world, then on to the mythical creatures being conned in to thinking they are in the big brother house when really they are being watched by the government, before finally coming to them being from a different planet and Earth votes to let them in to the planet, a sort of halfway house. The main theme throughout was the government were involved in someway and that you could log on to the police website to view and hear additional content by compiling a report of sorts. This sounded very exciting and offered a new experience for me personally in editing something that isn't actually human. One of the issues that came evident in the meeting was that as majority of us were visual people, we were unaware of how to accommodate radio in to our ideas as we thought that it was just generally people chatting to each other about some nonsense stuff to get people to send texts in. So we thought about many ways to accommodate radio in to the idea, which is where the idea of phone tapping the characters came about. I left the meeting feeling positive about the whole idea although struggled to see what role I could play at the moment as i'm a post production guy, I don't really have much input on the process and feel it's a bit unnecessary for me to be around at the moment for anything other than listening to what the actual plan is.
The next meeting was started with the news that we were going to ditch the whole idea of using puppets as some people weren't happy with the idea. That was a bit of a blow and as we started to float around new ideas of what to do, I found myself getting more and more unenthusiastic about the module on a whole and how this was benefitting me as an editor. I must of switched off as I don't actually remember what the idea we came out of that meeting settled on. Something to do with a literal video game, so the film is all POV and you have to make decisions to further the narrative, sort of like a tree branch system.
The meeting we had today I turned up seriously late as I mixed up the times. By this point the idea had changed once more to focus on Phobias. Majority of these changes were made due to the briefs for each project we were aiming at kept changing details which messed with our ideas. So the end result was Dr. Phobia's Science of Fear, which is a live event with Dr. Phobia trying to taking over the world by figuring what scares people the most. Not quite sure how they came to this conclusion but the idea sounded good and sounded like a marketable idea to inform people of the different phobias around. The idea of using the same actor for Dr. Phobia to link between the mini webisodes and the live show.
Still though, even though the idea was good for the module, still found myself asking what I was learning from this module, especially as we don't actually need to do any of the proposed idea other than an example to show the plan and that we've done our research. The task i've been given, seeing as i have nothing to do until the editing phase, is to look at how to go about creating a game app, even though we won't actually make it. I also have been tasked to do some photoshop work to do a bit of viral marketing, which although interesting to research and look in to new software, I don't think it will ever be helpful in editing.
In some respects, I think editors are a bit of surplus for this module and when I consider that editors weren't assessed on the projects for Production Management/Director's Voice films, I would of much preferred to have had the Advanced Editing Techniques from the start of the year now and have voluntarily help out for this cross platform module, while being assessed on our editing skills for the short films we worked on.
Ah well, tomorrow is the first meeting with the tutor for our group so will be interesting to see what our agreed final idea will be. It's just a shame I can't find any enthusiasm for this module......
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