FICTION ADAPTATION • Montage Workshop

In our montage workshop, we were given the task of creating a 3-5 minute long montage, filming it as a group and then individually editing it to create 4 different videos. The montage was to focus on one of these themes:

• Hope
• Fear
• Joy
• Despair

Ideas:

As a group (Becca Josh J, Ida and and I) fit chose our theme for the montage. We picked hope because we thought we could portray this on screen well. Our idea was to have Josh appear to be running for president, we would follow him along his journey, seeing him getting ready up until he did his campaign speech. We decided on filming in the style of Edgar Wright, using whip pans and fast transitions, and from this we wrote a hot list of everything we wanted to include, we also wrote out a script for the speech.

On the day of filming, we spoke to Mike who explained to us that a montage doesn't need to have a narrative and should be different images that connote the same emotion. I understood it by thinking about it as a mood board, that includes images all connoting the same thing. We realised that what we had planned was nothing like this and that we needed to make some changes in order to fit the brief. We went through out shot list with mike and he helped us decide what shots to keep and which ones would't have benefited us. 

As a group we diced to stick with our original idea and not change it but we just removed a few shots from out list. I think we still struggled with the and at the time I felt like I still didn't really understand what a montage was. I decided to ask Mike to explain it again and he showed me some explains to help my understanding, after this I felt more confident about the task.

Filming:

We chose to film lots of different shots in different locations to make the montage look more visually interesting. We used the jib to film a hero shot of Josh, and then used a Canon to film the rest of our sots, they were all hand held as because Josh was moving around a lot, it was easier that having it on a tripod and we wanted the shots to look like the audience were there with Josh throughout his journey.

Edit:

After I'd watched through all the footage, I didn't feel like I could really portray "hope" enough for it to be obvious. I decided to change my feeling to fear, and from there I used edited the shot together in the style of The Apprentice, as if Josh was a new candidate. I decided to make the video quite fast paced to keep the interest, I edited the colouring to make it darker and look more sinister, I also added the dramatic Apprentice theme music which helped to convey fear. 

I thin over all the shots we filmed we're that successful in portraying any of the emotions we were given, this was a mistake we made in the ideas stage and none of us fully understood the brief and what a montage really is.