Treatment

Treatment

BRIMFUL OF ASHA

BY THE THREE AMIGOS…
SAM GOULDSBOROUGH, HANNAH-JO WAINE, JORDAN WILMOTT



Treatment –Documentary Extract/Short Film/Music Video

We as s group are now going to discuss our finalised treatment, which we have now gathered through a number of techniques, including; Audience feedback, presentations, group discussions and research.

Firstly, we aim to produce a high quality music video which sticks to the codes and conventions of the indie genre, which successfully promotes Cornershop’s single ‘Brimful of Asha’ and has the purpose to entertain.

The target audience we aim to reach would be 16-25 year olds of both male and female gender, ideally, these people would have an interest in indie music/video techniques. We stereotypically connote (Roland Barthes) young people to enjoy fun, upbeat and at times, unconventional songs/videos, hence why we plan to include the plot and editorial techniques we have discussed as a group. In order to specifically reach this target audience successfully, we decided that our music video would be shown on music channel MTV2. The reason for this decision is, that unlike certain music channels, i.e. Kerrang, which is heavily rock based, MTV focuses on a wide variation of popular music renowned for being extremely popular with young people, indie being one particular genre

A plot summary of our basic beginning middle and end can be seen on our blogs, however, after looking at our audience feedback sheets, which we gained after completing a group presentation, along with simply talking to other class members and staff members, our planning has since developed onto a new plot, this is because our previous idea could possibly have been deemed too ambitious, this was due to many things, technicalities and time scale being two large factors. A basic overview of this new, improved and simplified plot would be;

Jordan idolises a famous, 'out of reach,' female movie star (Hannah), his best friend and lead singer Sam finds this excruciating to watch. Jordan descends into a dream-like state, where he is able to follow the iconic star around in a PA role, eventually, Jordan is brought back to reality with a bang, as Sam appears in the room with the real life star hand in hand. The song Brimful of Asha is playing throughout, apart from a short conversation between Sam and Jordan at the start of the song, which has no music playing at all. We will use the re-winding technique we have discussed in our planning, to follow the codes and convention of the song, this is when the song itself sounds as though it is being mixed/re-wound on a 45, at this point, the diegesis will re-wind to reverse Jordan's internal thoughts, and this is when present reality will become evident. Another effect we plan to use in our piece, is the visual illusion of one character (Sam) pushing frames off the screen with his hand, to make room for his own chorus performance scenes, this effect will be applied in post production.


In order to perform and achieve a successful and visually pleasing video, which goes above and beyond its brief of promoting Cornershops song Brimful of Asha, we (The three amigos) will have to select certain props, locations and costumes. Some of these are as follows;


Locations

At first, as shown in our previous planning, we selected a short list of a few possible locations, some of which were; Meadowhall shopping centre, different methods of transport ect, however, after researching these places, we hit a few problems. First of all, we discussed filming a bus driving away, however, similar to meadowhall, we discovered that every single person pictured in shot, would have to have given us written permission, or alternatively, be someone we know, considering that we planned to have a large croud scene of shoppers in meadowhall, this would have been almost an impossible task to achieve on such a large scale. Therefore, we abandoned the idea and had a group conference, which we recorded on audio, and came up with our new locations, which are; The Lecture Theatre in College, the Drama Studio in College and finally, one of our houses and other areas in and around college. We plan to photograph these new, finalised locations and upload the evidence onto our blog.


Props

Similar to the above, because our story changed, so did our props and costumes, we found that, now we have a clear plot, the props and costumes were much easier to decide on second time around. The main props we need however, are;

An ipod
A poster featuring an image of Hannah
A large camera
A trophy/Award
Flowers
A projector/Interactive white board


Costumes


We have also altered our costume change to stick with the new codes and conventions of our plot. Each Character will have their own designated outfit(s), some of which are as follows

Sam


Sam's character, is represented as being a typical 'cool indie guy,' therefore, we purposely came up with ideas for his costume which reflect this image, we based his image around typical 'indie' rockers, who are renowned for their 'quirky' dress sense, for example, bands like the Kings of Leon. We decided that his main costume would be along the theme of, a checked shirt, jeans and some grey pumps.


Jordan

For Jordan, we wanted his Character to come across as being quite geeky, due to the idea of him being oddly besotted with Hannah's Character, who he in theory, has never even met, we based his character's costume choice around stereotypically 'Geeky' Characters we see on Television, a strong influence for us was Channel 4's The Big Bang Theory, main elements of the Costume are going to be, dull colored trousers, glasses, a cardigan, a brief case and some non-descript plain shoes.


Hannah
For Hannah, because she plays a famous film star, we wanted to represent her in a very glamorous, iconic 'out of reach' way, We researched many iconic film stars, from Marilyn Monroe to Audrey Hepburn, however, to achieve a more modern representation, we looked at the film Battlestar Gallactica, and the strong Female character of Caprica Six, for the main advert of the film, she was denoted in a red, skin tight cat suit, which since, has become iconic for the film and its sci-fi genre. Although this representation is not relevant to our genre, we can take something from this, and ensure that Hannah's character becomes an iconic image within our video and its indie genre. Also, the colour red has connotations of passion and sexual dominance. We could also take inspiration from this idea, and use colours to give certain representations of our characters. A main costume idea is, some classy, iconic dresses, full, over the top make-up, big hair, possibly a fur coat, sunglasses and high heels.
Once all our characters become the band in the chorus, we will all change our costumes, apart from Sam who will look like a generic indie rocker all the way through our video. Hannah and Jordan will then be denoted in similar indie costumes to Sam, i.e. checked shirts and skinny jeans.

Technical issues

Throughout our video, we will attempt to achieve a number of techniaues, including, using a bright backdrop for the chorus, pushing one frame off screen to make way for another, lighting and colour effects. Again all of these effects will be applied in the post production stage of our work.

Recce

After selecting our chosen locations, we went on to go to them and investigate them for any health and safety issues, because all of our locations (apart from filming at our houses) are in College, most of the health and safety issues we may have faced have already been addressed, for instance, if we were filming in busy public areas i.e. town centres, there would be a risks of incidents like, assault from the public and road accidents. However, we still need to take care with things like; Filming beside roads/car parks around college, filming things like overhead high angle shots which can be made a lot safer by ensuring that another group member holds on to the middle of the filming group member, or their belt. Things we will restrain from doing are; filming late at night, going out alone, and going out without a mobile phone, or telling someone where we're going and what time we will be back.

Style notes

To add certain effects to our piece, to ensure it resembles a generic indie music video, we will attempt to use a number of different techniques, for example;

We are going to use mise en scene to help create certain stereotypical representations of indie artists, we will do this by using facial expressions as, indie bands are often connoted to us as being very stern and serious, and also by using costume. (see above)

We also intend to use interesting camera angles to reflect indie codes and conventions, for example, a crowd shot of the band where the lead singer (Sam) is positioned central, and nearer to the camera to denote importance, sticking to the rule of thirds.

As a group, we also decided that the beginning of our video would have no music, just ambient sound and shot reverse shot structures of dialect between Sam and Jordan's characters.

To add interesting framing techniques and transitions, we also decided that, if technically possible, we would use the effects of; One character pushing frames off screen to reveal the present frame, flash transitions to add a snapping camera effect in the photography scenes, and finally, hazy, misty transitions which we stereotypically associate with dream scenes.

Storyboard

Although our storyboard is currently in progress, we appreciate that certain elements of it may change once filming begins, due to many things, like lack of resources, technical difficulties, or even just discovering as a group, that certain things aren't going to look as good as we anticipated, or be possible.

Planning

We as a group have already been working hard on our planning in order to reach a stage where we can film, this involved a number of things, from group discussions, mood boards, scribbling rough ideas and taking verbal advice from fellow students and staff, because of this, we intend to develop this planning further and experiment with numerous computer programmes/editing techniques to reach a point where we are fully confident with our storyboard and know exactly how to carry out our effects and camera angles.

Audience feedback

In response to our treatment, we verbally asked members of the class to comment on how thorough they believed our blog to be. We took notes on their response and wrote them up;

Student 1: "The treatment you've created is really good, you can tell you have put in a lot of time and seem to have included most things, good use of theory and I like your ideas."

Student 2: "I think how you've used links and pictures throughout your blog, really makes it look good. Really clear and ambitious ideas."

Student 3: "Really good treatment, it's very long would be my only criticism, and maybe you could think in more depth about the costumes."

Student 4: "I think you should add more pictures next time you complete a task like this, that bit looks really effective and breaks up the big chunks of text, I think thats really cool how you have considered basing your characters on certain stereotypes."

Student 5: "Could be a lot shorter but you can tell it took you ages, good ideas, if you manage to pull off all the editing techniques this could be really effective, well done you three."

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Feedback response

We took this response into consideration and have made some changes in addition to our original ideas, in order to meet audience requirements, for instance, for the pre-production stage of this we have decided to take some pictures of costumes to give ourselves a much clearer idea of what our characters will look like on screen. The audience response showed that there wasn't much reaction about changing our ideas in any way, therefore we feel that they can just develop further as filming progresses, as a pose to changing anything drastic.