Having formed my own group with Leonard, Yiying, Clare and Bree, I had some concerns as ours is the biggest group, and naturally, more will be expected from us, but I hope that we will be able to rise up to the occasion and give our very best to our short documentary. If we all contribute and do what we have to, I am sure that we will be able to come up with a spectacular end product! Yeah! :)
Individual Objectives:
Personally, I am hoping to submit our short documentary to a film festival to get some exposure, it will be a major step at taking a shot into the film industry and I really hope that it will go well because I thought of the storyboard and have a clear direction for this documentary. Hence, my hopes for this project is relatively high. :)
By the end of this course, I hope to have expanded my knowledge of what a documentary is and how to make a documentary. I also hope to improve my skills as a director as I hope to be able to direct films in the future. I also hope to improve my technical knowledge in terms of camera handling, sound engineering and post-production editing.
Another thing that I hope to accomplish is that I hope to build up my contacts in the media industry here so that if I am to pursue a career here after I graduate, I will be able to tap into my network and search for a job opening from there.
Idea for the film:What I have thought up of is that because of the beauty and mystery the building seems to hold, we will take the film from top to bottom to give audiences a feel of what the building is like and we will then uncover some of the 'secrets' of the building by focussing on two or three of the studios within the building that captures our attention.
I have thought of an alternate storyline for the documentary. Although the Nicholas Building is quite old, there are surveillance cameras all around. We can interview the security guards to see if they captured anything interesting on tape or even 'ghostly encounters' that the guards have heard or seen of during their shift or on tape. This will make for quite an interesting documentary or even a mockumentary. :)
Progress so far:
After consulting with Christina, she has given the green light to use the storyboard that I have conjured up after touring the building. Clare has got permission from the management of the Nicholas Building to film at their open house and this is really important as some other groups faced a problem with wanting to film their subject matter.
We managed to obtain the right to film as we promised them that we will come with a sort of promotional video for the Nicholas Building to use in future. This I find is simply being realistic, we cannot expect people to simply help us for free, most of the time, people will only help each other for mutual benefits. Although I know that it might be hard to work in the time of coming up with a promotional video for them, I hope that we will be able to integrate it into our documentary.
We will be filming on both days of their open house, the 19th and 20th of this month from 4pm onwards. What we have decided to do, is that we will get some interviews done with the people at the open house, most likely the tenants of the place as they will have their own stories to tell about the building.
From there, if we chance upon any interesting stories, we will either shift our focus on that or we might integrate their points of interest into the documentary. You never know what stories you will hear from the interview, after all, humans are the most interesting creatures that one can ever encounter and every single person has his/her story to tell!
Documentaries are powerful, simply because they are not scripted from imagination, but happened in real life! As Shakespeare has written, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
