2. Research and Influences

The contributor had been chosen, so me (the director) and the editor met up in the 10 Stockwell Street library to discuss the kind of shots we would include to create the finished project. One of our ideas for the opening came from a scene from Hot Fuzz where the main character travels to Sandford (Hot Fuzz, 2007) a montage effect is used to make time flow very quickly while also giving the audience sufficient information about what the character is doing. This time condensing effect would be ideal for our project as it can only be a maximum of 3 minutes. For additional effect we talked about adding an animation of our contributor staring at a book and question marks around him showing the viewer that he is confused, we got this idea from both the film Limitless (2011) and Night School (2018).

While creating the shot list, the idea was put forward by myself to use close-up shots of the contributor. Putting the audience physically closer to the character, will make them feel emotionally closer to them. This idea was drawn from (Scottish Documentary Institute 2015, 1:16) the director Callum Rice seemed used this shot to make the audience feel like the contributor was talking right to them capturing their attention and drawing them in. This also works well when the cast talks about his mentor and his writing, two things that seem to be very close to his heart. After watching this documentary I wanted to try and use this effect, as our contributor also talks about personal things, them being his cousin as a motivator and his passion, boxing. 

Without watching these pieces of cinema our finished product would have been quite bland and not had many interesting visuals, the picture would have relied solely on the contributor but would have gotten boring after a minute or so.