Poetic Sequence.

For our poetic sequence we filmed in 'Okeh Cafe', we arranged to meet at nine o'clock in the morning, we met Dee and explained that this was a preliminary shoot and that we would be back for the full documentary soon, thankfully this was okay with her and she even agreed to ask her husband to be in the documentary which was useful for us. For my inspiration we watched the documentary 'Prime'by Ben Wu and David Usui.

http://vimeo.com/35965635

The pictures below are stills from the documentary, i think this shows the style we are trying to achieve, i would like to emphasise strong camera work and use of colour, achieving clean crisp focus on images will give our piece a more professional look. I like the use of interesting compositions in this film, it has inspired me to think more creatively in my cinematography. 

During the filming i feel we achieved some really well composed shots, we had a few hiccups in the beginning as we couldn't get the aperture to match up with the ISO, so five of our first shots were unusable which we didn't realise until we got the footage into the edit, it was slightly dissapointing but we have learnt for next time. We began by trying to thing of interesting ways to open the poetic sequence, as we didn't want to just get a typical frontal shot of the cafe, we wanted the space to feel enclosed and warm. In many ways our first year production sense's of space may have influenced this theme, as the cafe seems to really have a life of its own and we wanted to portray this aspect of the Mod lifestyle in sheffield in our poetic. It helped us practice ways in which to create a sense of space using image and sound, and this will be helpful for some of our other locations as they won't be as easy for us to create this.

One of our major downfalls was the inability to use the tripod on location, we would have been able to use one of the smaller tripods with less difficulty but unfortunately the tripod we booked out was too large for us to use inside the cafe. Again this is one of the things we are aware of now, we did have a shoulder rig which did help but we found it quite difficult to keep the camera steady on high angle shots. 

We captured some really interesting shots, some of my favorite's i have screen grabbed below.

I think from this you can see how we have taken inspiration from 'Prime' but the dark and earthy tones that come across in the documentary didn't suit the vibrancy of our subject for our documentary so we accentuated colour, while still playing around with angles and composition. 

The Pitch

Our pitch went well and both of our ideas were well received. But the majority of the class preferred the Mod documentary idea, myself included. We have made contact with the cafe and have spoken to Dee, one of the owners of the cafe who is more than happy for us to film there. We are making plans for our poetic sequence, we have the idea to centre our sequence around the cafe's day to day life. Showing it as a bustling hub of social importance to 21st centrury Mods. The Cafe is family run and is extremely local with many regulars, there is great potential for characters and exploring other areas of this lifestyle through them. We are hoping to get in and film with them later on this week.

Academic Texts.

Film Art an introduction - David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson 10th edition

p352.

This chapter outlines the difference between documentary and fiction, it says that the fact a film is fictional, does not mean that it is not tied to reality, for example the 'Godfather' takes place within historical events and the Locations are real, the story is not abstract, it remains true enough to represent the real world, while holding a fictional narrative within. It states that fictional films may also comment on the state of the real world with messages in the narrative. Michael Haneke's 'Hidden' is a good example of this, as he uses film as a medium to try and construct a non biased piece about some of the problems surrounding race. His use of world issues, in a fictional style leads the audience to wonder why he didn't make a documentary. Many documentary films blur the lines,  'The thin blue line', is noted for its use of reconstruction, the film is fully constructed using  actors and sets throughout.

Plan B

During the time between our last tutorial we had a group meeting to discuss our pitch, we decided to have a look at our other options again, we looked at one of our previously discussed idea's which was Charlotte's idea to do a documentary about MOD culture in sheffield, she knew a cafe on london road that was MOD themed. 

Okeh's Cafe Photgraphs.

We did a little bit of research into Mod culture and found out more about what it actually is as we had no idea.

Mod (or, to use its full name, Modernism or sometimes Modism) was a lifestyle based around fashion and music that developed in London, England in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the early to mid 1960s. People who followed this lifestyle were known as Mods, and were mainly to be found in Southern England.

Mods were obsessed with clothes and music, including Black American R&B and Soul, Jamaican Ska, and Bluebeat and a select few British groups such as the Small Faces, the Kinks, The Spencer Davis Group and The Who.

Mods would gather at all-night clubs to show off their clothes and dance. They would typically choose scooters as their mode of transportation, either the Lambretta or the Vespa. These were sometimes adorned with many lights and mirrors and were intended to gain attention.

Mods are sometimes seen as an outgrowth of the Teddy Boy movement, and the most obvious similarity might be their love of suits. However, their emphasis was more on England than the Teddy Boys, and perhaps this is part of the reason why they did not appear on a big scale in other parts of the world.

This is a good definition that i found on the internet, that encompasses the many aspects of this British trend. 

We became more interested in this as a subject for our documentary, as there would be a wide range of things to cover from the fashion to the music, and obviously the transport, using the cafe as our base for the documentary and showing it as the hub of mod life in sheffield. Our pitch will be going up against our previous pitch for the Castle market and it will be useful to gauge some feedback from other classmates. 

I am now leaning much further towards this idea and i feel that we can do something fresh that hasn't been done by previous students, as we found out our first idea had been done before.