Filming Alterations

After completing what could be called a 'first draft' of our video, we gained feedback as to what alterations, if necessary we should make. The main criticism was that our piece does not fully fulfil the genre requirements, and this is mainly due to the lack of psychedelic visual effects. These are obviously required due to the emphasis drug related effects, crucial to the psychedelic genre.

Therefore, it is clear that we need to work on emphasising the visual qualities of drug abuse further, fulfilling the genre conventions to a higher degree; thus appealing to our target audience. The reasons for the psychedelic genre using unusual visual experiments, such as the kaleidoscope, is due to the idea these are aiming to reflect the effects narcotics have to the user. Obviously we are not using narcotics, as we believed the representation and visuals of taking high class drugs; for example, heroin, has become a cliché, this would also disrupt the idea that the protagonist has come to the point where he believes his only option is death - and drugs do not portray this wish. However, despite using purely alcohol, we do not believe this detracts from the idea of the psychedelic visuals, due to our aim to show the ideas of emotion, and isolation within the piece. It is also clear, due to the state of our protagonist, that he could possibly be experiencing these hallucinations due to his extreme distraught nature. 

Therefore, to gain these new visual qualities, moving us further towards the psychedelic genre, we have decided to shoot our protagonist in front of a Green Screen, thus allowing us to use footage and background effects that link our piece to the genre. This will obviously involve some experimentation as we have not used this device before, however, this will hopefully allow us to gain some interesting imagery. 


We have come up with various ideas that we believed would fit well with the message we are aiming to portray. An example of one of our ideas is portraying our character falling, as though from a tall building. This would greatly help to portray the emotions felt within the piece, however, obviously we have large constrains due to this being a low/no budget piece. Therefore we need to plan exactly what we wish to portray, and how to do so. This may mean using more kaleidoscope/hallucination type imagery as I believe this would work very well to anchor our piece to the genre.