Land Project Critical Reflection

Land-Critical Reflection. ‘Housing’. I worked in a group with Jack Courtez and Michael Conolly Our focus for the land documentary was that of ‘Housing’. This is a particularly broad subject to base a documentary on, so we decided as a group what we wanted from the documentary and the message we felt was most important to put across. We decided to incorporate the reasons the building of houses in rural area’s, looking at why it happens and why there can be problems. When filming we felt it was important to capture Urban and Rural area’s, to get contrasting pictures and sounds. We decided that there should be no narrative in the documentary, and that all of the voice in it should be used as a soundtrack. We drew up a rough guide of what we wanted to film, and how we wanted the film to look before we started filming. This gave us something to refer back to when we were unsure of what to film. It also helped to keep us focussed and thus we didn’t waste any time filming things that weren’t going to be useful in the documentary. We didn’t just use footage that we shot ourselves though. At the beginning of the film is some footage of St James’s Hill in Surrey. We asked for permission to use that piece of footage but didn’t hear back from the owners of the footage. However we are protected by ‘Fair usage’ as we only used a small clip that was necessary for our film, and also credited them at the end. The helicopter footage isn’t particularly interesting visually but we felt that the Poem being read over it was interesting as it speaks about how land is free, whilst St James’ hill has been acquired by the rich. We decided to use a poem about property and land at the beginning of the piece as it sets the tone, and introduces the subject of the film without being overly obvious. When that is finished we upped the sound and used short clips of men building houses, and the machinery. We used this because the sound is good, and is engaging for the viewer from the very start. We sped up some of the clips as well to give the video a pace. We used the footage of building sandwiched between the peaceful natural shots to emphasise the impact that man has had on the surroundings. Over the top of the rural shots that we got from around Winchester we used sound from an interview of a woman on a NIMBY campaign demonstration. She is outlining her concern about houses being built in the countryside and we layered it with pictures of green land and wildlife. She was never shown on shot as it was just used as a soundbite and part of the audio track not as in the form of an interview on the news. We then used the voice of a man addressing a crowd talking about why they are opposed to lans to build houses on a local beauty sot. The voice is layered underneath pictures of idyllic countryside. We felt that the sound was good for the piece as the man was very animated and was talking in a dramatic way which worked well over the pictures. We then faded it to black to show that something more dramatic was about to ha en. It was here that we used a piece on music that we had created on Garage band over pictures of Urban Decae. This contrasted with the previous images which had been of building and countryside without showing how laces can end u . We underlaid flashing images that we got off Creative commons of riots, which we flickered over the localised footage as almost a warning shot of what poverty can lead to when its at its most extreme in Urban area’s in Britain. We chose to film most of the Urban Decae images in the St Mary’s area of Southampton, as we knew that there was a high crime rate there, and thus we wouldn’t have to look far for some decaying buildings. I think this worked well as the shots show what can happen when a lace becomes urbanised and contrasts with what had come previously. Throughout the images of Urban decae and the music, we underlaid more soundbites from the demonstration and began to repeat them to emphasise that these issues aren’t just going to go away. When filming the Urbanisation we weren’t filming in HD which was a mistake because it meant that the images were slightly grain. We then stopped the music and faded to black to show that the worrying about housing art was over. We then used soundtrack from an interviewee who isn’t opposed to building new houses. He was a lad from Nigeria whose beliefs contrasted from those used in the earlier shots. We used natural images to show his calm opinions on what is important. We then went on to show Surburbia and overlaid a number of shots of new build houses, to emphasise how similar they all are. These pictures were used over the singing of a busker which came from the Barton Farm rotest footage. We felt that the tempo worked well over the shots of the Surburban estates as the tempo was upbeat and suited the journey-like style of filming we used. We decided to use music over the urban and suburban footage to seperate it from the shots of countryside and natural beauty. We used natural sound for those shots as we felt the images spoke for themselves, and they were supposed to come across as peaceful as possible. I felt that we were lacking an interview with somebody who lives in Surburbia and if flourishing because of new building. The interview with the Nigerian immigrant didn’t contain the same passion and tempo as the other soundbites and I think that art of the film suffered as a consequence.