Video Project - Miseryyyyyyyy

For the second week of the Interactive Arts course, and for our second group project, we were set the challenge of creating a 'sweded' film. A sweded film is a low budget production of a film condensed into around two minutes and usually a funnier version. I was in a group with Kirsty (who was in my party project group), Amy and Yasmine and our film was 'Misery.' I was the only member of the group who had seen the film and couldn't remember much so we began by watching most of it on Youtube picking out the key parts. We then gave each other roles to do as in creating a certain prop or finding objects of use. We decided to go down a comic book style route 1) to make prop creating easier as we they didn't have to be truly realistic; 2) so we didn't have to talk on camera as the audio is often fuzzy (we used speech bubbles on camera); 3) to make it more comedic.

The next day we met again at 10 and used the morning to storyboard and refine our ideas so we could get straight on with filming and in the afternoon we took on the filming at Amy's hall's flat which was the setting for the main bedroom. Originally, I was to play the James Caan role of the writer with Yasmine being Kathy Bates' psycho roel, however, at the last minute Yasmine had to take her boyfriend to hospital so Kirsty had to step in so the performance's are not meant to be great and weren't very prepared.

Editing took place the next day, which took 6 hours to complete as we had a lot of ideas to include, such as a staged car crash with a toy car and fight scenes and we also layered in sound bites from the film, sound effects and background music. We did get confused by the timing on the Final Cut Pro software and thought our footage only hit 1 min 5 secs but when screening it, it turned out to be 6 minutes so it was longer than we would have liked.

Overall, I thought the project went really well. It was fun to take part in, I relearnt editing techniques I had forgotten and the final product makes me laugh so because of that I preferred this project to the party project.