From Paper to Screen
Hi Guys! This blog post is to let you know about our group, ‘Exploring Emotion on the Home Front’, meeting up in London and what we got up to in that time. A couple of days after Christmas we arranged to meet up at the Imperial War Museum. A chilly Monday morning marked the first day of the meet up and when I arrived at the Museum not only was I greeted by Tanya and Daisy, but also two 15-inch naval guns. I found out that both had been fired during the Second World War. That didn’t stop me from going inside the museum ofcourse!
One of the first tasks we decided to tackle was editing the script for our film. The script had to be cut down, and the translations needed to be corrected and the ending agreed upon-lots to do as you can see! This could have been a fairly long process, but with all three of us working together we managed to reach a version that we were all extremely happy with. The research we had all carried out before was particularly helpful, as it helped us decide what sources were the most important to us and had to be kept in the film.
We then started thinking about the promotion of the film and had to explore what our film message is, and come up with a tagline, which could be used for the promotion of the film. This was quite tricky as it was hard to condense the plot and meaning of our film, but finally we came up with ‘can our experiences of war transcend national identity’?
We ended the first day of the meet up by drawing our story board for our film. For our first scene we have decided to have birds morphing into planes and back again as the major visual theme. This represents our film, we want the visuals on screen to be interesting and more metaphoric than real. This works brilliantly with our film genre, animation. The animated image on screen will be accompanied by quotes from our primary sources; a perfect combination of factual history mixed with imagination.
On the second day of the workshop we got the chance to explore the Imperial War Museum and look around at the exhibitions. This was great as it provided more context and visual ideas for our film. Also it was quite fun to look around the museum together as a group and get closer to the historical objects!
For the end of the meetup we arranged a workshop with Chocolate Films, our film mentors for this project. Sasha was brilliant! She showed us all the different techniques we could use to create our visual footage; using sand, silhouettes, and paper puppets on a light box. Sasha gave us the opportunity to have a practice on the light box and use the software that would record our footage. This was fantastic as we saw our ideas go from paper to screen! More updates soon.
